Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy Read online

  He had let Lise out just after six o’clock in the morning, motioning her through without a word of congratulation, not even a ‘Bonne chance’ – Perhaps he had seen too many women come and go and wanted to get back to his newspaper – but, Never mind, thought Lise. She was outside.

  It had been cleverly managed; announced for the afternoon, but if she had come out of Vesoul then, there would have been a barricade of cameras and journalists waiting. A crowd probably hostile. ‘La Balafrée released.’ ‘La Balafrée.’

  ‘Yes, that was my nickname,’ said Lise. ‘La Balafrée. The branded one, gashed for life.’ ‘La Balafrée, Madame Lise’ … ‘Madame Lise gets off after only ten years.’ Lise could imagine the headlines, the talk revived; commuters reading their daily papers in trains, comments from politicians, gossip in cafés and factories, shops: women at home pronouncing over their coffee, ‘Something wrong with our penal service … It’s not justice. Far too soft … only ten years!’ Let them try just one, thought Lise. Would any of them have said ‘Poor woman’?

  But she was not poor; she, Lise, now, at thirty-seven, had no surname she wanted to own, no family or old friends to greet her, no possessions except what she had in her suitcase, no money except the few hundred francs she had earned in the workshop; in fact, nothing except hope, but she stepped out into the April morning buoyant with the happiness Father Louis was to see all those years after. She stood on the pavement and took a deep breath.

  ‘Will you be frightened?’ Marianne Rueff, the Assistante Sociale or Welfare Officer, had asked her. ‘It would be only natural after so many years.’ But Lise was not frightened, only a little giddy, and feeling a stranger, as she had felt when, after the few discreet goodbyes, she had crossed the prison outer courtyard with its trees and lines of parked cars to the gates.

  It was the first time she had set foot on that courtyard ground since the day when the great gate had opened to let in the police van, the ‘panier à salade,’ with its load of miserable occupants. She had not noticed the trees then; it had been too difficult getting down from the van because she had been chained to the woman next to her, as they had been chained on the long train journey, two by two like miscreant sheep; Lise’s wrists had been marked for days. It had also been raining, a cold dark afternoon, And I was dark, black dark, with no feeling as if I had been made of wood, wood not iron thankfully, she thought now, because there is a tale, or is it a sentence that someone once said when speaking of a lute, that anything made of wood has an affinity with the Cross.

  ‘But why did I take three years to find that out?’ Lise had said to Soeur Marie Alcide. ‘It was only after I had done three years that suddenly your white tunics … Why so long?’

  ‘Well, perhaps you were not ready,’ said Soeur Marie Alcide.

  ‘I suppose if it were the same for everybody it would be very dull,’ Lise had said.

  ‘I think you will find God is never dull,’ said Soeur Marie Alcide.

  ‘You are put down as Elizabeth Fanshawe,’ the Directrice had said that first night at Vesoul. To Lise it had sounded almost like another accusation. The Directrice and Sous-Directrice were in ordinary but well-cut suits; they looked not like senior prison officers, but everyday women, except that both had an unmistakable authority; the clerk, writing down particulars as the forms were filled in, was in white, and Lise had caught a glimpse of Madame Chef, the chief wardress, her white uniform gold-starred on the lapel, and over it a dark blue cloak. The new arrivals had gone in to the office one by one. ‘Elizabeth Fanshawe, but you are known as Madame Lise Ambard.’ Mercifully the Directrice did not add ‘La Balafrée’, though that had screamed from the headlines in every newspaper. ‘Quinze ans pour La Balafrée’ ‘La Balafrée condamnée à quinze ans … fifteen years’ ‘La Balafrée’.

  ‘I am Elizabeth Fanshawe,’ said Lise.

  ‘Then you are English!’

  ‘I was English once.’

  ‘But of course you are English,’ Patrice used often to say. ‘Anyone not a fool should see that.’

  ‘Most people think I’m an American.’

  ‘Americans don’t often have that long-legged grace.’ Lise knew she carried herself well. That was from years of Aunt Millicent’s ‘Sit up, Elizabeth. Don’t slouch,’ and I was taller than most French girls, ‘Nor do they often have fine bones like a racehorse,’ said Patrice. ‘Didn’t the English have a king,’ he teased her, ‘Somebody Longshanks?’

  ‘Edward Longshanks. That’s hardly a compliment.’

  ‘You don’t need compliments, thank God, chérie. Then there’s your voice. Do you remember how embarrassed I was when I first took you into a restaurant? It carried into every corner, that “county” voice.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. It’s not county. My father was a solicitor.’

  ‘But of what family! You have “family” stamped all over you.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know them and they certainly don’t know me …’

  ‘Next of kin?’ the Sous-Directrice had asked.

  ‘No one.’ Lise could not, possibly, name Aunt Millicent.

  ‘There must be; someone has to be notified in case of illness or death.’

  ‘There is no one.’

  ‘Then what is to be done in the event …?’

  ‘Put me in the dustbin …’ but Lise could not say that; she shrugged.

  She had told Jacques Jouvin the facts; facts, to her, were the least important; he had had to deduce the rest which was perhaps why, in court, he was so badly defeated.

  Jacques – ‘Jacquot’ to them all at the Rue Duchesne – was Maître Jouvin, a well known and eloquent lawyer who, out of kindness, had chosen to defend Lise. ‘But I have hardly any money, Jacquot. It all belonged to Patrice or, rather, Emile.’ Emile, small, pale, greasy-skinned, with his quick currant-black eyes and short-cut hair, lived in the shadow of his splendid brother. ‘But Emile had more power than we thought,’ said Lise. ‘He kept the accounts, which really governed everything.’

  ‘Rosamonde will have to go,’ Emile had pronounced one day.

  ‘Go? Go where?’

  ‘Where they all go,’ said Emile without interest: ‘to a cheaper house if she’s lucky. Maybe the streets …’

  The streets were a different world from a ‘house’, and one despised the other. ‘But I started like that,’ said Patrice, ‘sending out my girls,’ but even then he had groomed them carefully. ‘Monsieur always had class,’ Eugenia, the maid in charge of the rooms, said in pride. He showed Lise in fun. ‘Stand against the wall – pretend it’s a doorway or a porch. Lean … look at ease. Pull your stomach in, girl. Light a cigarette. Now show me your leg. Lift it … higher … now show the other one discreetly – you must always be careful of the flics – the police. Now! I’ll be the client. Puff your cigarette so that the glow shows your face. Now follow me. No, don’t move. Follow me with your eyes.’

  ‘Coming with me?’

  ‘How much?’ and Patrice laughed again. ‘How much will you charge me, chérie?’ But to Lise it was not fun. To be put out of a house to that …

  ‘You have had Rosamonde for fifteen years,’ she had protested to Emile.

  ‘Precisely. Which is why she’s not earning her keep; she’s too old.’

  ‘Milo! She might end up in the Seine!’ Emile shrugged.

  ‘If there was no chance of a sou for Rosamonde,’ Lise told Maître Jouvin, ‘what hope will there be for me?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Jacques. ‘I don’t care about the fee, but please, Lise, be frank with me,’ and Lise had tried to tell it all, as simply and directly as possible, first for Jacques, later to Soeur Marie Alcide, as one day she would tell it to Marc, ‘when he had to know,’ said Lise.

  It seemed an interminable dossier. How absurd, said Lise. ‘It took me two minutes to kill Patrice, two and a half years to compile the reason why, and three days of public time and money for the Court to find me guilty when I had already said I was.’

  Th
e dossier – the truth but somehow oddly distorted – had been read out, French fashion, to the assembled Court before the trial began. ‘In England you are tried first for the particular crime before your disreputable past is made known,’ Lise was to explain to Marc.

  ‘Where did you meet Patrice Ambard?’ That was almost the first question Monsieur le Président had put to her.

  ‘In a fountain.’ Lise could not say that but it was true.

  It had been the night of August the twenty-fourth, 1944, the Liberation of Paris, when the French tanks came roaring down the Avenue d’Orléans, and all bedlam broke loose as the people massed the Avenue, every avenue, the boulevards and streets in a sea of hysteria and joy. Every Place was crowded, the bars were giving free drinks as bells were rung, the deep note of Notre Dame sounding over all.

  It was dangerous; bursts of fighting were still going on as snipers shot from the roofs, but every corner was already full of French and Allied troops. They had to protect their prisoners from the crowd who spat at them, kicked and bit, even tried to lynch them. Men climbed ladders to sit on window sills and walls; they sat in trees, as they shouted and sang.

  Lise had driven all day, coming up from the coast. ‘I was seconded to the Motor Transport Corps, picked to drive the American General, General Simpson. I can see myself now in my khaki tunic and skirt, green flashes, so proud of my camouflaged Ford with its fluttering flag. I was just twenty.’

  ‘France,’ Aunt Millicent had said doubtfully when Lise told her in confidence that she might be going there. ‘Will it be safe?’

  ‘By then it will.’

  ‘Does it mean Paris?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Lady Moberly used to know of a good pension where they took English people. I wonder if it’s still there.’

  ‘Aunt, I’m in the Army; there’ll be quarters.’

  Lise lived with Aunt Millicent, ‘because I was an orphan. My aunt had hardly been out of our village, Greenhurst,’ and, ‘I don’t like it,’ said Aunt Millicent, but to Lise the thought of Paris was the most exciting of her life, ‘which wouldn’t be difficult,’ she had told Patrice, ‘brought up in a little Sussex village by a maiden aunt, going to a small private boarding-school for girls. We couldn’t afford very much. If it hadn’t been for the war I might have turned into a second Aunt Millicent,’ she had teased Patrice.

  ‘You! Impossible.’

  She had driven into Paris that first night, or tried to drive, but the traffic was jammed; people surged round the cars and trucks; soldiers sat girls on the bonnets; they stood on the mudguards and climbed on the roofs, cheering every army car they saw, waving little French or American flags or Union Jacks.

  ‘Why were you waving an American flag when you’re English?’ Patrice had asked.

  ‘I took it off the car.’

  Lise had tried to edge along the pavement, the corporal in the seat beside her doing his best to guide her but she could hardly hear him. The General and his A.D.C. were in the back and at last her ‘old boy’ as Lise called him had leaned forward. ‘It’s no good, Liz. See if you can turn into the next side road and stop. We’ll walk, or try and walk.’ After almost an hour, Lise succeeded in that. ‘Lock the car securely and come back in the morning,’ the General ordered. ‘We’ll hope she’ll still be here. Make a note of the street. You can fetch her, then report.’

  Lise had failed to report.

  As the ‘old boy’ got out of the car with the Captain he had stopped. ‘You know where you’re supposed to be staying, Liz?’

  ‘Yes Sir.’ In front of the other two she did not call him Simps as she did when they were alone. She gave him the paper with the address.

  ‘Do you know where this is?’

  ‘I haven’t been in Paris before.’

  ‘I see. Well, I shall need Captain Harlan. Corporal …’

  ‘Yes Sir.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Collins, Sir.’

  The General gave him the scrap of paper. ‘Corporal Collins, you will escort Driver Fanshawe to her hostel. Here is the address,’ and, to Lise, ‘You speak French, Liz?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Enough to ask the way?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You will take her straight there?’

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘Sir …’ began Lise.

  ‘Orders are orders,’ said the old boy.

  ‘But …’ and it burst out, ‘I have never been in Paris before.’

  He stopped, looking down at her – he was so tall he could do that – and as he looked a surge of people were round them; one woman caught Lise, hugged and kissed her then dared to kiss the General. ‘Please,’ beseeched Lise.

  ‘Very well.’ The eyes below the bushy eyebrows smiled. ‘Let her have a little tour around first, Corporal, but not too long or too late, Liz. Promise.’

  Fortunately the crowd swept them apart before Lise could give that promise.

  It was ten o’clock. For three hours or more Lise had walked, danced, drunk wine with whom she did not know, in bars and cafés so crowded nobody could sit down. They were giving free drinks. ‘Take them while you can get them, mes gars. It will never happen again.’ At first Corporal Collins had held Lise’s arm in a grip so hard it bruised but, as with the General and A.D.C., they had soon been swept apart – and the Corporal had her scrap of paper. Lise still had the name of the side street where she had left the staff car and its keys were in her pocket; if she could find her way back, she could unlock it and sleep in it; she had been too happy to bother, but now she was getting tired; her feet were aching. It had been a long day and, ‘Excusezmoi, Madame. Est-ce-que vous pouvez me diriger …?’ but a band of young Americans, G.I.s and French girls, exuberant with joy and wine, pulled Lise away and into their ranks. ‘Come on, Polly.’ Why Polly, wondered Lise? Perhaps they called all English girls Polly. ‘You don’t wanna stand there talking that rubbish.’

  ‘But I want to go home.’

  ‘No one’s going home tonight. C’mon,’ and soon they were in a chain, dancing and buffeting. They came to a Place where they could swing the girls high; Lise’s cap came off, her hair fell down. Here, fountains were playing; perhaps they had not been turned on since the Occupation and someone had rigged up lights, red, white and blue, playing on the water. People sobbed with joy as they saw them. In a final burst of exhilaration, the young men swung the girls into a fountain.

  ‘That’s where I first saw you,’ said Patrice. ‘Laughing and splashing, rising from the water like a nymph.’

  ‘Funny kind of nymph in a khaki uniform.’

  ‘It didn’t look like khaki – dark. You might have been wrapped in water weeds and your dark hair, wet and streaming. I can still see your wet face and the blue of your eyes …’

  All that Lise knew was that the man who helped her out of the fountain was no ordinary person. To begin with he was not in uniform – even Patrice did not dare to wear one to which he was not entitled – and, by his clothes, she thought he must be someone important. He was not as tall as she, but Patrice had ‘presence’, she did not know what else to call it, and charm; he rid Lise of her Americans not only with authority but friendliness – what he said in French she could not then fathom. He was red-haired, something she had not known a Frenchman could be; that, his blue eyes and fair skin were even more difficult to explain when she saw Emile, a ‘frog’ Frenchman if ever there were one. They must have had different fathers – or different mothers, thought a more grown-up Lise, but she never knew which. Patrice and Emile said little about their family though once, ‘It’s the Norman in me,’ Patrice had said of his hair and eyes.

  He was far older than she – how much older she did not see until they were indoors under electric lights; He’s at least forty, thought Lise; that to her was a great age then, but it did not seem to bother Patrice. ‘If ever there were a happy hypocrite,’ he said often, ‘I am he. I amuse myself as if I were twenty. Worry? I
leave that to Emile and take what I want from life with both hands.’

  At the moment it was clear he wanted Lise.

  ‘Mademoiselle, you are very wet.’ He had an extraordinarily sweet smile. ‘Somehow he always kept that,’ Lise was to tell Maître Jouvin and, for a moment, was not able to go on.

  ‘You are very wet.’

  Dripping from the fountain, Lise had laughed and thrown back her hair.

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘Not tonight. Who could mind anything tonight?’

  ‘I mind that you are probably catching cold. Are you alone?’

  ‘Yes.’ Lise said it so firmly that he laughed too. ‘But I think that must not continue. You must let me take you to your – but it wouldn’t be a hotel. Where are you staying?’

  ‘That’s just it; I don’t know. Corporal Collins knew but I have lost Corporal Collins, and my cap …’ She could not stop laughing.

  ‘You seem singularly carefree, Mademoiselle.’

  ‘Oh, I am – I am …’ but Lise was beginning to feel dizzy; she swayed and he caught her.

  ‘I think, besides being wet, you are a little drunk, Mademoiselle.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t had wine – much – before.’

  ‘And nothing to eat.’

  ‘Not all day.’ Now her teeth were chattering.

  ‘Restaurants are impossible; also, you are wet. I’m sorry I sent my mother out of Paris,’ – Lise was to hear of that fictitious mother again – ‘but our apartment is quite near and dinner is waiting. Let me take you there.’

  ‘But …’ ‘At least I had the sense to hesitate,’ Lise said afterwards. ‘I have orders.’

  ‘How can you carry them out?’ That was unanswerable. ‘Don’t be afraid. Patagon will chaperon us.’

  ‘Who is Patagon?’

  ‘My macaw – blue and yellow and big and fierce. He will tear me to pieces if I touch you. Come.’