She put her suitcase on the rickety stand provided for it, took off her coat—once good, now threadbare—and removed her hat. She washed her face and hands in the basin, supplied with a mere trickle of water, but enough for her purpose. Then, in a moment of bravado, she took out a powder compact, and sponged the last few grains on to her cheeks.
That day in Paris brought Marjorie back into the human race, that was how she saw it. The next morning, the memory of a meal such as she hadn’t had for years still in her mouth and in her mind, she woke early, and set off to walk the Paris streets. She stopped for a café au lait and a croissant, the buttery pastry melting in her mouth, a taste so delicious that it almost hurt senses dulled by the last few years of darkness and fear and despair. How could she have thought of leaving it all? Of never again greeting glad day as the sun rose over the Seine, never feeling a taste explode in her mouth, never greedily gulping down coffee, hot and black and bitter.
She walked along the left bank, over the bridges, across the Ile de la Cité. In her mind was the France of Dumas, an untouched world of swords and kings and musketeers, not the rundown shops and streets in front of her eyes. Flaubert would provide a more realistic model, but no, on that day she saw Paris through the eyes of a Romantic, not a realist.
And so the evening brought her, weary, but with an underlying sense of happiness that was so unfamiliar she didn’t trust it, to the Gare de Lyon, to catch the overnight Paris-Lyon-Nice train.
On which the French lawyers had booked her a compartment, a bed in a Wagon Lits carriage; a luxury beyond her imagining. She pinched herself as she sniffed the clean white sheets, jumped guiltily as the conducteur put his head round the door to enquire if she wanted anything, and then made her pillow wet with tears.
Tears for what, she asked herself, as she turned the damp object over and gave it a defiant punch. For the girl she had once been? For the fact that she was, despite her best efforts, still alive? That someone, even someone she knew no more than the man in the moon, had cared enough to leave instructions and money for her to travel in this quite unaccustomed comfort? Tears of relief for being away from her wretched life in England, of gratitude for the exquisite omelette she had eaten at the station before getting on the train, of anger at herself that she should be grateful for such tiny things.
Les petits riens, she told herself as she snuggled luxuriously into her berth. The train seemed to echo the words, petits riens, petits riens. It was the little nothings that made life worth living, in the end.
Then she mocked herself for thinking such nonsense. The petits riens were all very well, but it was the greater things of life that caused all the trouble, and they pushed everything else out of the way, crashing in on one’s dreams and delights, and turning happiness into misery.
In the next compartment, George Helsinger wasn’t asleep. He preferred wakefulness to sleep whenever possible, only succumbing to slumber when tiredness simply became too much for him. For sleep brought dreams, and these were dreams he could do without. It was odd, that he, the least violent of men, should have become involved in the most violent act humanity had ever wreaked upon itself. And that even ten years later, his guilt and sense of moral failure should still haunt him in this way.
Pure science, that was what his life was about, so how had it ended up with nothing pure about it, and a bang that changed the course of the world? Nothing, now, would or could ever be the same again. He marvelled at how people went about their daily lives as though nothing were different, as though it had merely been another bomb among the tens of thousands, a bigger bomb, but still just death and destruction falling from the sky.
But it changes everything, he wanted to tell people. Only no one wanted to hear what he had to say. It was over now, past, history, what was done was done, and hadn’t that act of extreme violence brought an end to all the other violence, and wasn’t that a good outcome? And if they now all lived under its shadow and threat, well, wasn’t all life a risk?
He had found recently, as he lay in a state between wakefulness and sleep, a zone where the bad dreams and memories were kept at bay, that prayers from his youth came traipsing into his mind. He had, he would have said, long put the fathers and their rigorous, prayer-filled life behind him. He had become a man of science, had turned his back on God, had played God. Along with his fellow scientists.
Yet here were those words, filling his brain with their remorseless repetitions. The Kyrie: Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. Hail Marys—how long was it since he’d said a Hail Mary? Yet the words were there as though they’d never left him: Ave Maria, gratia plena. Blessed art thou…
Was he losing his wits? Was he going to end up in a mental asylum? He’d heard rumours about some of his fellow scientists, that they’d gone bananas; well, many of them were bananas to start with.
He didn’t notice the clean comfort of the sheets; he was moving in a world of bewilderment, in which French lawyers and Wagon Lits reservations seemed to be nothing to do with him. The meeting with the lawyer in England came back to him like the memory of an inexplicable dream.
‘You can go?’ Mr Winthrop had asked. ‘There’s no problem about leaving the country?’
George had stared at him. ‘There is a problem, for I have no money. And even if I had, the amount one is allowed to take out of the country is, I believe, quite inadequate for anything more than a few days in Ostend.’
‘Not quite as bad as that. Many people manage to go away for a fortnight or more on their allowance…However, that need not concern us. All your expenses will be paid, and the arrangements for onward travel from Paris will be made across the Channel.’
The late Beatrice Malaspina. Who was this mysterious woman, summoning him from beyond the grave, drawing him across Europe to he knew not what? The lawyer in England had been able to give him no details; the lawyer in Paris was working to precise instructions, he said. If he knew anything more, which George doubted, he was not going to pass on the information.
In the morning, he would be in Nice. Nice! Haven of artists and writers and aristocrats, a world away from his laboratory, from the dingy rooms he occupied in Cambridge, from rainswept, foggy England.
He could see the map of France unfolding in his mind’s eye. Down through the Loire valley, the railway line running alongside the great river, down through the heart of France and so into raffish Nice; raffish but at the same time elegant, that was how Nice had been before the war. He had spent a fortnight there in the languorous hot days of 1938, guest of a fellow scientist, unusual for being of a background and wealth quite unlike most scientists.
His host, he recalled, had gone on to enjoy a distinguished war, adviser to Churchill, honours, position.
And, no doubt, a sound digestion and a good conscience, and the ability to sleep at night. Any destruction he had wrought on his fellow human beings had been a remote affair, a matter of memos and committees and impersonal, reasoned decisions.
I should have been a biologist, George told himself. Or a botanist, what harm had botanists ever done to anyone? Would he ever have imagined, as a bony boy, that his passion for mathematics could bring him to a state of such despair? His first teacher had warned him how it might be. ‘Numbers will get the better of you, George; you will never be able to escape them. They will be the master, not you.’
Prophetic words, if only uttered to take a brilliant youngster down a peg or two.
Lulled by the steady rhythm of the train, George slept despite himself, overcome by sheer exhaustion. And for once his sleep wasn’t trampled on by the hobgoblins of the past; he slept soundly and dreamlessly, and awoke