An Act of Treachery

by Ann Widdecombe

Genres: General Fiction; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

'A tale of illicit love, hate and loss in occupied France . . . confirming [Ann Widdecombe] as an eloquent storyteller' GLASGOW HERALD Catherine Dessin, a young French girl living in Paris during the occupation, falls for an older, married German officer. The novel examines the tensions this causes within her family of patriots and resistance workers. Meanwhile Klaus, the German officer, who is Oxford educated and a professed Anglophile, faces his own moral dilemma as he comes to realise, through his love for Catherine and a tragedy in his own family, the true nature of the regime he is serving. 'A gripping read' SUNDAY EXPRESS 'Widdecombe is to be applauded for the range of her ambition within this book: the admirably large cast of characters is well-handled, their dilemmas are believable and the narrative makes for compulsive reading' THE TIMES

Release date: December 1, 2011

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 265

Sample

Berlin 1961

All day we have watched them building that great, cold, cruel wall; stone by stone, coil of barbed wire by coil of barbed
wire and as it has grown, so has our despair. We menace them with our hatred, our eyes boring into their distant forms, but,
inexorably, they build, build, build a wall not to keep their enemies out but to keep their own citizens in, a wall to imprison
free men and women.


Kurt got out in the last wave of refugees, carried in a blanket by two young women, strangers whom he had not seen before
nor since, who took pity on him as he crawled on his hands and the half of the one leg the war had left him. When we can leave
Berlin he will come to stay with us for a while until he has traced his sister who preceded him to the West.


We are sitting in a small, overcrowded, dingy café, drinking ghastly coffee and watching, mesmerised, although there is a
chill now in the air and soon it will be too uncomfortable to stay. We are hungry but somehow it seems indecent to eat, callous
to go, an act of desertion to turn our backs on that determined, deadly activity.


Germany now appears completely divided, families cut off from each other. For how long? For ever? Will the West act? America,
Britain? When I suggest it, Kurt mentions Poland and Hungary and predicts that the West will express outrage but do nothing.
Unhappy, morose, helpless, he orders more coffee which none of us will enjoy and none wants.


The sound of a brief protest reaches us, a minor disturbance, ineffectual, angry, token, heartfelt. Willi stands up and stretches,
reluctant to stay and reluctant to go. He takes the handles of Kurt’s ramshackle wheelchair, which he bullied, bribed and
cajoled to obtain and I stand too, gathering up my handbag and blue lace gloves which Mutti gave me for Lotte’s wedding.


As we prepare to leave the café I look back, not at the table we have left nor the wall they are building, nor the small knots
of angry, weeping people but at the two girls.


They too have been watching all day, from a room on the second floor of a house near the café. Sometimes they have looked
out together, leaning over the window ledge for a better view, a more certain angle, and sometimes one has looked and described
the scene to the other. They must be about thirteen and fifteen and as they have watched the building of the wall and the
goings-on in the streets so I have watched them.


One has long fair hair and the other a modish permanent wave and I know exactly the mixture of fear, excitement and wonder
they feel. I know that one moment they are filled with dread and the next with the excitement of witnessing a major event
in history, that they are fascinated as well as repelled, that they want to play a role in the drama unfolding before them
even as they yearn for the stability and security of a childhood in which the grown-ups were always in control, capable of
meeting any challenge. I know that they want to crush the oppressor and receive the thanks of grateful compatriots, that they
imagine themselves heroines of a resistance movement.


They hate the oppressor; want to shoot him, humiliate him, hear him beg for mercy, see him wet himself. And they are fascinated
by him, want to know him, like him, love him, share victory with him.


I know because, twenty-one years ago, I too was fifteen, with long fair hair, and I leaned out of a window with my sister
and watched a conquering army from another Germany in another age, as the Nazis marched into Paris.


JUNE 1940

They had entered Paris, arrogant, triumphant, condescending, the previous Friday, but we had as yet seen no Germans though
we spent hardly a minute away from the window. Our parents had confined us to the house and I was growing every minute less
afraid and more resentful, for I should have been roller-skating with Bette by the Eiffel Tower and looking forward to a visit
to the cinema, not sitting here with my elder sister, Annette, watching an empty street.


I was going through one of those awkward phases in which I both drew closer to my siblings and quarrelled with them more and
especially with Annette who thought her seventeen years gave her the right to patronise me although, at fifteen, I was now
an inch taller than she was and still growing.


Martin was twenty and had already gone off to join the then embryonic Free French in England. We had argued furiously one
day over my friendship with Bette and when I had cooled down and was seeking him out to make peace, my father told me he had
gone to fight and I was wretched with a guilt which still occasionally nagged in spite of the happy letters I had since received.


Annette was the next eldest. She was formidably bright and destined for the Sorbonne but I did not resent that because I was
academically idle and happy to be so – to the despair of my father – and, more importantly, I knew myself to be beautiful,
with the longest, thickest, fairest hair in all Paris. It was therefore frustrating that I had not the faintest idea how to
capitalise on my looks as I was painfully shy. I spent hours in front of my mirror imagining myself to be Viviane Romance but I was certain
that other girls knew more about being women than I did and the thought took away my confidence.


My younger sister, Jeanne, was eleven and my baby brother Edouard was just walking. A few months before I had overheard a
conversation between my grandparents in which Edouard was described as a mistake. These days I thought I knew what that meant
and felt rather grown up in the knowledge.


My grandparents lived with us and occupied the top floor of our house near the Avenue Charles Floquet. I adored my grandfather
and confided in him but Grand-mère was strict and scornful of my laziness at school. I visited upstairs only when certain
that my grandmother was helping out in the kitchen below me.


My father, Pierre Dessin, was a professor of English at the Sorbonne and found my poor marks embarrassing, but he tried hard
not to favour Annette. In this he was assisted by his unfeigned admiration of my long yellow hair which was a genetic freak
in a family of dark-haired, sallow-faced, not particularly well-favoured beings. My grandmother remembered an aunt with identical
hair and peaches and cream skin. Nevertheless my father was demanding and persistent in his quest for high standards, often
subduing our spirits just by being there when we wanted to be frivolous or silly. He was rarely aggressive but I was vastly
more relaxed with my grandfather.


The nuns who taught me in the Convent School in the Rue de Varenne were much less impressed by my looks than they were despairing
of my attitude to work, frequently making unfavourable comparisons between Annette’s prowess and my own. I was separated from
Bette in class because we would both giggle helplessly when obliged to practise English phonetics in front of hand-held mirrors
to ensure our lips were forming the words correctly. I hated English, with its impossibly inconsistent spelling and the grammar
I could never master despite everyone’s insistence that it was simple compared to our own language. Even my father’s persistent
coaching could not save me from ignominy.


Martin had tried to interest me in maths but I was a dunce with algebra and could not follow a geometrical proof to save my life. He had given up in despair.


I had little concentration, being easily distracted in lessons, dreaming through Mass on Sundays, wearied and inefficient
during chores at home. I did not want to remain much longer at school but the only attraction of getting a job was the prospect
of some money.


Suddenly I was concentrating fiercely, for Germans had entered the street. Annette abused them profanely, but softly because
she was frightened. I looked at them in disappointment, having vaguely expected the sort of strutting formations which now
paraded daily down the Champs-Elysées, not a handful of six or so soldiers looking curiously about them in relaxed fashion.
I wondered where the Germans would stay and suffered a frisson of excitement and unease at the thought that one might be billeted
with us.


Annette, having discharged her patriotic duty by cursing the oppressors of France, began to assess those now before her with
the critical eye of a seventeen-year-old. She decided that a tall, stentorian-voiced man of about thirty was too arrogant
but that a younger, stouter one was too feeble. I picked out a laughing, fair-haired youth who looked scarcely out of school
and Annette was predictably scornful. Boys might be all right for me, she declared, but she preferred men.


We both moved sharply away from the window as the object of her scorn saw us and waved. A few moments later Annette cautiously
peered round the curtain again only to find him still watching and laughing. Quickly she moved back. The same sequence followed
several times before I realised that she and he were playing a game.


‘Annette,’ I whispered, shocked, ‘you are flirting with the enemy.’

‘Nonsense,’ retorted my sister furiously, ‘I was playing infantile games with a kid who probably misses his mother.’

Sulkily she moved away from the window and I was faintly conscious that I had destroyed her fun by moralising at the wrong
moment. I had been going to tease her about Emile, our nineteen-year-old second cousin, the object of her latest crush, and
ask her what he would have thought but now I desisted. Annette had a fearsome temper and I avoided provoking her whenever I was perceptive
enough to read the signs of an impending storm because she could be both cruel and spiteful and I still cried rather too easily.
It was a habit which exasperated my parents, who made unflattering comparisons with Edouard. Frequently after such quarrels
I found consolation in admiring the reflection of my wonderful hair, tossing my head, glorying in the movement of my thick
mane.


Still irritated, Annette began to berate me about my friendship with Bette. I had heard it all before from her, from Martin,
from other girls in my class. Bette had what they called ‘a reputation’. She behaved inappropriately for a young lady of her
age. Well-brought-up girls did not act like that. Because her unusual name sounded like the French for beast, bête, the most common adjective applied to her by the disapproving was ‘wild.’ Oddly she seemed to like this, apparently feeling
flattered by it.


I heard Annette in silence, not feeling compelled to defend Bette, who never bothered to defend herself and who shrugged off
the censure of others as at best amusing and at worst irrelevant. I would have given much for just a fraction of her insouciance
and mammoth self-confidence.


Eventually Annette wearied of her tirade and turned back to the window. ‘They’ve gone,’ she said and I was not sure if she
were relieved or disappointed.


‘We’ll be able to go back to school soon.’

‘Yes.’

She did not sound enthusiastic and I looked at her in surprise.

‘I wonder what it will be like?’ she mused and I knew she was not talking about school but about life under the Germans.

A few minutes later my sister Jeanne came to find us. Usually she came to show off about her schoolwork, which was brilliant
but, when she wanted praise, she invariably pretended to need help instead and just as invariably she sought it from Annette
rather than from me, producing some horribly difficult algebra or translation so that Annette would marvel at how she was
doing such complicated work at so young an age. My elder sister always obliged.


My comfort lay in knowing that Edouard loved me enormously and that he would always come to me before any of the others, toddling
precariously, steadying his balance by clutching my skirt, looking up trustingly as he tried to communicate. I hoped he would
grow up to be less clever than the others – or at least less enthusiastic about being clever – and I knew I should be ashamed
of the hope for he was a boy and I had been taught that it was important for boys to be clever and grow up to be successful
and keep their families well.


Today, however, Jeanne was unaccompanied by any tedious textbook. She too was preoccupied with the conqueror and for a while
the three of us stared out of the window, hoping for another glimpse of enemy activity, but we watched in vain. Wherever else
the Germans had business that day it was not in the vicinity of the Avenue Charles Floquet. In the evening some of my mother’s
relatives came to visit, among them our two second cousins Emile and Robert.


Rumour was rife and contradictory. The Germans were oppressive: we would live under a regime of curfews, starvation rations,
hostage taking and torture. We might be shot if we forgot to acknowledge an officer, all the remaining men would be rounded
up and sent to some unspecified destination and no woman would be safe from the appetites of the conqueror’s rank and file.


The Germans were very correct and courteous. They wished to woo not oppress. They wanted us to believe that life under them
would be better than life before they had come. We would be able to go about our daily lives unmolested and the officers would
shoot their own soldiers if they stepped out of line.


Nobody in our small family gathering was prepared to accept either version unconditionally. ‘We shall just have to wait and
see,’ observed my mother, predictably but accurately, and no one contradicted her.


My father raged against our native leaders rather than against the enemy. Gamelin or Weygand, Daladier or Reynaud, they were
all as bad as each other, generals and politicians alike. They had no will but Hitler had and that was why he was successful.
My father retained this view throughout the war, being one of a minority who did not condemn Britain for shelling the French navy at Mers-el-Kebir and he never mentioned Pétain’s name without
a snort of derision.


Pierre Dessin was clear-headed and far-sighted. That was why we had not joined the Exodus, when so many had fled Paris to
escape the German invasion – the population of the city had fallen below a million – thus keeping our family and home intact.
Often I would read the adverts for lost children in the coming months and think how it could have been Edouard or Jeanne.
Early in the war, when food was less scarce, we had stocked our house with sugar, flour, yeast, dried fruits and even obtained
a hen which Jeanne christened Catherine, presumably to annoy me. I thought the name suited her and soon we all called the
creature Catherine the Second.


We had what for Paris was a comparative rarity, a small back garden which we dug over to grow vegetables. Long after others
had begun to feel the severity of shortages we had the means of producing eggs, bread and greens. Of course we suffered too
in the end but it took longer and we stayed healthier than many.


An unfortunate consequence of my father’s tendency to be right was that he had scant time for any opposition to his wishes
and my mother had long ago given up any attempt to impose her own will, almost invariably falling in with him. He loved his
family enormously and would have given his very life for any of us but it was, I later realised, the love of a benevolent
despot.


So we listened to my father’s views with respect but when my grandparents began recalling the previous war the young people
moved to the dining room where my cousins pushed the table against a wall and Annette and I rolled up the carpet. Soon we
were dancing to music emanating from my absent brother’s gramophone. As Annette danced with Emile I had to make do with Robert
who smelled of strong and unnecessary aftershave and paid me stilted compliments on my tumbling yellow hair.


We danced decorously and formally. I had a feeling that Bette might have behaved very differently had she been there. I wondered
why Bette always seemed to find it necessary to draw so close to her dancing partners, to retain her hold on the hand of whatever
boy helped her up when she fell while skating, to smile at perfect strangers when good-looking men passed us in the street. Tonight I was faintly perturbed by a vague but insistent
notion that, had they been alone, Annette might have behaved towards Emile as Bette did towards so many. I at once deplored
such conduct and wanted to copy it, to understand it, to search for its undefined, elusive magic.


‘I’m in love,’ Annette whispered to me when we had put out the bedroom light.

I sat up and peered through the darkness in the direction of her bed.

‘With Emile?’

‘Isn’t he wonderful?’

As there was no way of answering that truthfully at such a moment, I remarked that she would keep the same name if she married
our cousin.


Annette snorted in disbelief. ‘I’m not talking about marriage. I am talking about being in love, wildly, beautifully, madly,
hopelessly in love. Emile, my darling Emile.’


Long after she slept, I lay awake puzzling. What would life be like now the Germans had come? Would we have to learn German
at school? Could I persuade my father that it might be better for me not to attempt baccalauréat at all than to fail humiliatingly
and could I face a job day after day without the prospect of school holidays?


Above all, did not love and marriage always go together? What was Annette talking about?

Just as I began to doze a scream sounded in the night air, faint but still unmistakably a scream, a woman’s scream, a sound
of terror as she faced some hazard in the darkness while I lay warm and safe. It did not recur but I had never before heard
a cry of fear in our road where by day children pedalled on tricycles and called to each other as they played. At dusk the
lights went on in the houses where mothers prepared to welcome home the older children from school and the men from their
work.


With no reason for such certainty I was sure the Germans were responsible for that scream, that whoever cried out was not
being robbed or subjected to something which I always vaguely described as worse by a Frenchman. The Germans had come, they
had been in our road that day and now someone screamed. The word Juden floated into my mind and I cowered under the bedclothes, wondering if I should wake my father, taking refuge in the absence
of further cries as my reason not to do so, guilty at my inaction, grateful for my own cosy safety, worried that new dangers
stalked my life, envious of my sister’s sleeping calm.


In the morning no one else could remember hearing any scream, although Jeanne rebuked me for not calling the police. I thought
her indignation more likely to stem from pique at having been deprived of a drama than from concern for the unknown woman.


To my disappointment I found that life had quite suddenly returned to normal and that we were to go back to school. My only
consolation was the prospect of exchanging news about the Germans with Bette, though I had the wisdom not to confide this
to Annette or Jeanne as we walked to the Convent.


We did not walk together for long because we were regularly joined by other girls along the way and divided naturally into
age groups. I walked with Cécile, Françoise and for the last hundred metres or so with Bernadette as well. Annette referred
to us dismissively as ‘the ankle sock brigade’.


It annoyed her that I did not mind the insult because I genuinely hated stockings which I wore, protesting, only when I had
to look particularly well dressed. Socks did not ladder and were quick to put on in the mornings when Annette seemed to spend
an inordinate amount of time adjusting her seams. I simply could not understand the attraction of the nasty brown things which
Annette wore with such pride now that she was in the top class and allowed to, a privilege that others of my own age group
appeared to regard with unaccountable longing.


Bette hated ankle socks with the same passion I brought to bear on being obliged to confine my hair in thick plaits. On arriving
home Bette rushed to discard her socks and I my hair ribbons. When I visited her home, a large apartment a few streets away,
we played with her secretly acquired lipstick and powder and giggled as we bashed each other with her large brown teddy bear,
Alphonse. Recently we had giggled less because Bette had enlarged her supply of make-up and took it more seriously and she
seemed to prefer twisting my hair into a series of impossible styles to playing with Alphonse. Illogically I felt sorry for Alphonse and regretted our lost fun. Dimly I understood that
Bette and I were beginning to enjoy different things and that this might weaken a long friendship, but whenever this thought
surfaced I repelled it firmly.


On this occasion I missed Françoise whose family had left Paris in the Exodus. Indeed it was a very depleted assembly at school
which Sister Benedicte lectured on doing our duty under the Occupation. Disappointingly this duty turned out to be paying
even closer attention to our studies, carrying on as normal and allowing the Germans as little chance to disturb our routine
as possible.


Times might become very hard. The world was at war and we could expect increasing shortages and restrictions on our activity.
It was each girl’s duty to bear such privations with fortitude and to show more concern for others than for herself. Such
charity did not of course extend to the Germans who were the undisputed enemy of our country and of all things Christian and
decent. We must be patriotic and pray daily for liberation, but we must not engage in silly token acts and provoke the enemy,
thereby inviting retribution and worrying our parents who would have plenty of other things to be anxious about. Resistance
should be left to the grown-ups.


We listened and then, subdued and faintly excited, we split up into our classes for the first lessons of the day. Next to
maths my biggest dread was Latin. Not only did the language defeat me with its precise construction and seemingly endless
rules, but the nun who taught us had little patience with stupidity and none at all with laziness, regularly humiliating me
with her sharp tongue and setting extra tasks which I carried out as lamentably as the original ones.


Today, however, as we struggled with the second book of the Aeneid, I felt an unusual interest and I sensed the same in Cécile who was wont to yawn whenever she was obliged to face the misery
of translating Virgil even though her efforts invariably drew praise and but for whose whispered help my own would have attracted
even more derision.


The flame and fury of the sack of Troy were missing from the invasion of Paris: there had been no bloody slaughter, no din of battle, no portents erupting from the Heavens, yet in my
imagination I walked with Aeneas. When he and Creusa became separated in flight they were my parents, fleeing the Germans
and whatever dark force had prompted that cry in the night. Anchises suddenly became my grandfather; Iulus, who trotted beside
his father with unequal steps, was Edouard.


Caelum ruit, Troia fuit. I felt tears stinging my eyes and dreaded making a fool of myself before realising that the class was as intent on the story
as I and Sister Aloysius unusually gentle. Heaven falls. Troy is no more. Could it be that Paris might one day disappear as
completely as Troy, its Eiffel Tower a mere legend which future historians would be unable to verify? Could Notre Dame be
reduced to rubble? Would archaeologists a hundred years hence dig up fragments of the pictures which filled the Louvre?


‘No,’ said Bette firmly when I proposed this scenario during break. ‘These days nothing will ever be lost entirely because
there are so many books across the world, so many photographs. People will always be very sure that Paris existed and where
and when. But that doesn’t make us any safer. The Germans could still raze Paris to the ground.’


Cécile argued that would be the last thing they would do. Paris was no good razed if what Hitler wanted was an empire. Instead
the Germans would set up an administration like the empire makers of old in Africa and places like that. Bette disagreed,
pointing out that this piece of empire making was being resisted, that a war was raging and that actual battles might be fought
in Paris between the English and the Germans.


The debate was inconclusive and the uncertainty left me feeling not so much afraid as resentful. I wanted merely to be left
alone to live the sort of teenage life I had been expecting to live without this unwarranted intrusion into my daily routine.
I had formed a definite but unspecific notion of privations yet to come and I felt unreasonably cheated. At that moment the
Germans seemed less a menace than an irritation which I wanted to brush off as an insect from a sleeve.


The feeling persisted when Father Jean told us we must pray for our enemies. I did not share the outrage of some of my classmates or the saintly compliance of others. I would forgive the
Germans when they had gone and left us to get on with our lives, and only then would I pray for them, not now because they
were just too much of a nuisance. My feelings were reminiscent of my attitude to Edouard when he was being tiresome and persisting
in some naughtiness. The enemy should go back home to Mother; his behaviour was simply too bad for him to be welcome.


Yet at night I was afraid again and tried to sleep early to avoid hearing any cry which might ring through the darkness.

As I approached my sixteenth birthday in the September of 1940 I realised that the celebrations would be different that year.
Rationing meant that the usual large family dinner would lack meat and there would doubtless be an over-emphasis on vegetables
and fruit, then stil. . .