The Caves of Périgord: A Novel

England in his luxurious automobile and take you and your ladylove to the finest restaurant in Périgord, and he will tell her how brave you were,” she said, smoothing the boy’s hair.
    “I’ll have to get into training first,” said Manners jovially. “The way Christophe drinks, I’ll be under the table before I can tell her he saved me from the ambush. With my bad foot, I’d never have got away without Christophe helping me. It must be all that eau-de-vie he drinks. Never seen anybody who could hold his drink like Christophe.”
    When the boy slept, she told him that the fishmonger had been shot after the Milice reported his van had been used in the escape, and his eyes surprised him by filling with silent tears for a man he had never known.
    “It’s all part of the madness,” she said, and smoothed his cheek, as if for the first time he had aroused that tenderness she displayed to Christophe. His tears kept flowing. “We just have to survive it. We will survive it. There will be restaurants after the war, and you will take Christophe to a glorious, drunken dinner.”
    “And I will buy you lingerie in Paris,” he said, forcing a smile. “From Lanvin.”
    “Now I know you’re getting better,” she laughed, and left him. When she came back the next day, she brought him a collection of Mallarmé’s poems, dressed his foot quickly, and said she had to leave. He felt desolated.
    “I’m sorry, but you come way behind a pregnant horse in my priorities just now,” she said, ruffling his greasy hair, and then wiping her hand in a matter-of-fact way on her smock.
    When she left, he took the scrap of soap, limped out to the yard, stripped and bathed himself from head to foot under the pump. He came back with a basin full of water, and washed Christophe’s hair as well. Then he took his Rolls razor from the small tin case that had been with him since Palestine, stropped it to sharpness, and shaved Christophe and himself.
    François came later the same day, with cigarettes and a collection of De Maupassant’s short stories, and a bottle of cognac that he claimed had been liberated from a German canteen. There had been another parachute drop, and Marat had provided them with information about an ammunition train that they had derailed. They did not talk about the fishmonger, nor about the German reprisals. The war was going very well without him, said François, and when he left, he took Christophe with him, to shelter on a cousin’s farm.
    Sybille did not come for two days, and when she did she was angry with him. “You have been trying to walk on this foot,” she accused him. “The cuts have opened again.”
    “Not walking,” he lied. “I was using the crutch and I fell.”
    “You’re a fool,” she said coldly, reaching for the iodine. “To think that you can fool your doctor.”
    “That’s just it,” he gasped through the pain. “I don’t think of you as my doctor.”
    “Because to you I’m just a vet,” she flared.
    “Because you’re a woman.” He leaned back and closed his eyes, relishing the warm touch of her hand on his foot. He felt her hands stop their work. “Because you are beautiful and I want to be in your house watching you cook and listening to Jean Sablon on your gramophone.” There was a long silence, and she continued changing his dressing.
    “You just say that because you enjoy my omelets and my music. You like to relax in my little fantasy world of the time before the war,” she said, her tone too forced to be light.
    “No. I want it in the time after the war,” he said tiredly, despairing of ever reaching that deep melancholy within her. “Before the war, you belonged to someone else. I want you to belong to me. In the war, after the war, I don’t care. I want to belong to you.”
    He opened his eyes and stared at her, and reached out to take her hand, not knowing if she would leave or dismiss him with a joke. Instead, her mouth worked as if she were about to cry but she left her hand in his. Suddenly he knew, and he felt a great tenderness as the conviction gripped him, that there had been no other men since her husband. And the private sanctuary of her room and her gramophone, which she had shared with him, was already a privilege.
    “Seize life, Sybille, while we have it,” he said, knowing as he said it that this was what he believed in most of all.
    “You are a fool of an Englishman. It isn’t that at all,” she said softly. “I am feeling