The Catalans - Patrick O’Brian

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passed slowly, and still he did not go. She did have one respite, for Carmen died, and at the tail of her noisy grief the recollection came to her that now Madeleine was to be secluded and dressed in black. This dried her tears, and the event that she had sincerely mourned seemed now a positive relief.

      Yet even in Saint-Féliu mourning for a cousin cannot last for ever: it can take up a great deal of energy, black cloth, and time, but it has an end, and the day came when Dominique and her two sisters sat working out the date again, the time of the young man’s removal, reckoning up the months with an angry impatience.

      As it came nearer Dominique looked forward to it with pleasure and relief: but when it came she was not in Saint-Féliu, nor was Madeleine, nor was her husband, nor any one of her uncounted relatives and friends and customers. Grass, knee-high, was growing against her shuttered door, and between the cobbles of the street grass and long-drawn weeds strained up toward the narrow slit of sky: the fishing boats, dragged up to the Place and chained there, lay sunk in a green haze of grass, and in the grass the trodden lanes showed the track of the German sentry’s round.

      The inhabitants of Saint-Féliu were dispersed about the interior, and the Fajals were far inland, right under the mountains of Andorra, where some remote cousins had a farm. Francisco, with many others, was in Germany, working at forced labor in a factory; a great many more were in camps as prisoners of war; a few were in North Africa, having escaped through Spain; and six from Saint-Féliu were dead, killed in the early fighting.

      It was a strange, slow nightmare, all that period, impossible to relate to real life. That only began again with the return to Saint-Féliu, with the opening of the long-shut familiar doors, with the re-creation of something like the known old life, going to the same pump with the same crazy, shrieking handle, going up the same number of stairs to bed, waking in the dark to hear the same cry of the fishermen waking the laggards, ‘Xica-té, es l’alba.’

      Real life appeared to begin again as soon as the Germans had gone, but in fact a long interval of excess came between that time and the new normality – excess of happiness, excess of relief, excess in eating. It would be wrong to add excess in welcoming the return of the men from captivity; excess is not the word at all, but rather unbounded rejoicing and a tendency in the free and overflowing generosity of that time to attribute equal worth to all who returned from that gray and brutish land. Thus Francisco and the others who had gone with him were received with almost as much joy as the soldiers whose glory was reflected on them. It was not that they did not deserve a hearty welcome from their friends, but these young men who had been taken for forced labor had done nothing heroic: they had not volunteered to go, it is true, but they had let themselves be seized, while others had taken to the mountains rather than work for the enemy, and some had gone over the seas to fight again. At the time Madeleine had wondered; even in the middle of her sorrow and wretchedness, she had wondered that Francisco had been taken: they had certainly swooped down unexpectedly; but still she had wondered.

      But that was all forgotten now in this great rush of feeling. There was no room in the whole town for anything but joyful ebullience, an almost frantic merriment; and when Francisco burst through the shop in the evening a few days after his return, plunged into the back room where all the Fajals were sitting, and told them that he was going to marry Madeleine at once, they made little more than a general, formal objection.

      There was a scene, of course. Nothing of that sort could possibly have passed without a scene of kinds: there was a fair amount of screaming, a very great deal of shouting all together, and some tears. But the elders did not really have their hearts in it, the strong-minded sister Mimi was away, and in the end tears were dried all round, and Francisco, late though it was, went off to see the mayor.

      In the interval between this emotional evening and the marriage Dominique’s objections were held in abeyance to a fair degree. She uttered some gloomy prophecies, but at the same time helped to prepare the clothes for the occasion with a lively pleasure. She defended the wedding against Mimi’s protests with so many arguments that she nearly convinced herself, and she dismissed Mme. Roig’s disapproval with a short and dry ‘If she does not like it, let her remain in her own house: that is all I say; let her remain in her own house.’

      She could not but admit that she had a handsome prospective son-in-law: he was well over six feet tall now, loose-limbed and gangling still with the contradictory grace of youth; his hair curled in black waves all over his head as it had done when he was a boy, but now there was an appearance of open, frank virility in his lean face. He had not come back from Germany so thin as some, nor nearly, but he was lean, and he had a continual appreciative appetite. It had been a little piping boy that Dominique had fed with caramels not so many years before, but now his big, deep barrel of a chest was filled with a thundering baritone, and when he sang the glasses hummed on the table. And yet, for all the virility in his face and for all the depth of his voice one would not have said that there was anything very manly there – the impression was certainly not that overwhelming masculine, beer-and-skittles, hairy impression that some men give. There was an admixture of sweetness, gentleness, or docility, something very unlike the desperate male carapace of toughness that the young men of Saint-Féliu put on with their breeches, a quality that could be described as wonderfully romantic or a trifle mawkish, according to the observer’s sex or degree of liking for the man.

      It was a hint, no more: nothing could be more inaccurate than to show him as a softy, or as anything like a softy, a young man who could be made game of with impunity by his fellows. He did not look like that at all. In any country he would have been reckoned a tall man, and here he towered over the little dark Catalans: and there was enough of his father – the old Camairerrou with a proved and shocking reputation – in his face to make it clear that you could not play with him.

      As a son-in-law he had improved in his connections, by no effort of his own. Camairerrou had distinguished himself during the Occupation by drowning one of the occupying German soldiers and by taking to the mountains when the evacuation of Saint-Féliu was ordered: there, continuing his trade of smuggling over the border, he had fallen in with an organization that passed refugees down into Spain, and knowing every path and cave in that wild neighborhood, knowing them even in the dark, he had been able to pass over several Allied airmen, secret agents, and Frenchmen bound for Algiers. Whenever it had been possible he had exacted a thumping great fee for his services, but when it had been clear that no money was to be had he had taken the men over for nothing. This, and the fact that when he had been paid he had invariably performed his bargain, redounded very much to his credit after the Liberation: so did the knowledge that somewhere in his house he had all the fees surrendered by his paying customers. He was still a lamentable father-in-law for Madeleine, but no longer an unmitigated disaster.

      So they were married. They were married cheerfully, but with a background of gloomy muttering. They were married in the mairie with the tricolor, and in the temple with orange blossom, legally and sacramentally, and they were married in the Café de Gênes with dried sausage and anchovies, cakes and sweet wine, popularly.

      Throughout the day, with the increasing effect of the wine and jollity, the forebodings of the elders had died down; but in the morning, with the wine quite gone and a general deflated sense of anticlimax abroad, they began again. They were ill-timed forebodings, intrusive and sometimes ill-natured; they were founded less on logic than on emotion, but they soon began to prove themselves to be true.

      In the circumstances it would have been strange if they had not been true. The young couple lived in the upper part of a house belonging to the Fajals at the back of the town: it was a dank, narrow house stuffed into an interior angle of the fortifications, and the sun could not reach it at any time. The lower part of the house was a store, and the upper part had been arranged with the idea of letting it to summer visitors: but the scheme had been quite unsuccessful and for years the stiff, bright-yellow varnished wood furniture had stood rigidly on the shining linoleum, cold even in the flood of August. It was an unhappy arrangement: in the first generous flush the intention had been to give it unconditionally to Madeleine and Francisco as a home; but very soon the flush receded and as there had been no exact terms – nothing specified on either side – the elders began to withdraw the implied gift, until by the end of the year the place was little more than a set of furnished rooms

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