Léon and Louise by Alex Capus, John Brownjohn Read Free Book Online Page A

lying around for the ravens to devour.
    Although Louise seldom had anything consoling to report, she refrained from false embellishment and always told the truth as far as she knew it, realizing that truth alone can stand the test of time. She took her task very seriously, and the inhabitants of Saint-Luc repaid her with warm affection. Becoming accustomed to the ominous squeak of her gentleman’s bicycle, they all listened for it and were glad when it grew fainter instead of ceasing abruptly outside their homes.
    Many people revered Louise like a saint, but she didn’t like this. In order to destroy the halo they tried to impose on her, she smoked her sugared cigarettes, bathed half-naked in the Channel on Sundays, and acquired an arsenal of coarse expletives that contrasted strangely with her slender figure, girlish voice and educated French.
    The worst thing was, news of a soldier’s death often got to Saint-Luc long before the ministerial notification – for instance when a comrade home on leave reported at the kitchen table that Jacquet, the schoolmaster, was lying at the bottom of a muddy shell-hole with his skull shattered, whereupon the news spread like wildfire from house to house until it reached every kitchen table in the town save the one to which Jacquet, the schoolmaster, would never return; for the spreading of rumours was a punishable offence and notification of a death had to be conveyed to the bereaved through official channels alone, to preclude any distressing errors and mix-ups. This was how it came about that Jacquet’s widow, who still had no idea she was one, bought a big joint of beef at the market in joyful expectation of her husband’s home leave. Meanwhile, the other women timidly and sympathetically watched her out of the corner of their eye, and then, so as not to arouse suspicion, greeted her as casually as they could manage.
    Once Louise had taken over the job, however, this problem too was solved. ‘Go and tell little Louise right away,’ any soldier coming home with bad news would be told from now on. When Louise’s squeaking bicycle pulled up outside her front door, a previously unsuspecting widow knew at once that it would be a long time before she bought a joint of beef big enough for two.

    Léon Le Gall walked home in a very pensive mood the night the landlord told him all this. It was not only the first warm night of the year but one of those nights on which you could see the sheet lightning generated by the front line beyond Saint-Quentin; and occasionally, when the wind was blowing from the north-west, you could also hear distant peals of thunder. Léon unbuttoned his jacket and took off his cap. He watched the vagaries of his own shadow, which lay at his feet, short and crisply defined, whenever he walked under a lamp-post, then gradually lengthened and was bleached by the intensifying glow of the next lamp-post until it lay at his feet and grew brighter and paler once more. He removed his jacket and slung it over his shoulder. It was far too warm for the time of year, and he now wondered why it had never occurred to him in the last five weeks and three days, when going for his evening stroll, to take off his official garb with its ludicrous sergeant’s stripes.
    The station building at the far end of the avenue of plane trees was in darkness. No light was on upstairs either. Léon pictured old Barthélemy, blissfully snuggled up against the comforting warmth of his Josianne, slumbering his way towards another working day beneath a thick duvet. He walked across the station yard to the goods shed, then climbed the creaking stairs. His silent room hummed with the echoes of his memories of the day just past.
    He reflected that, next morning and on all the mornings that followed, he would be greeting incoming trains with his little red flag. He thought of his jiggery-pokery with the Morse transmitter, of his fear of the creaking beams, and