Madeleine

by Euan Cameron

Genres: World War II; Historical Fiction

Synopsis

"Immersive, nuanced, impeccably researched" IAN RANKIN

"Beautifully written and moving" ALLAN MASSIE

"Poignant, nostalgic and redolent of the smell of France" SIMON BRETT

Family history has always been a mystery to Will Latymer. His father flatly refused to talk about it, and with no other relatives to consult, it seems that a mystery it shall always remain. Until of course, Will meets Ghislaine, his beautiful French cousin, in a chance encounter that introduces him to his grandmother, Madeleine, shut away in a quiet Breton manor with her memories and secrets.

Before long, Will has been plunged headlong into the life of Madeleine's great love, his longlost grandfather, Henry Latymer. Reading Henry's old letters and diaries for the first time, Will discovers an idealistic young man, full of hopes and optimism - an optimism that will gradually be crushed as the realities of life under the Vichy regime become glaringly clear.

But the more Will delves into Madeleine and Henry's past, and into France's troubled history, the darker the secrets he discovers become, and the more he has cause to wonder if sometimes, the past should remain buried.

Release date: June 27, 2019

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 272

Sample

I HAD NEVER MET A SINGLE MEMBER OF MY FATHER’S French family until I happened to be in Paris towards the end of January 1999. The chamber group in which I play second violin was due to give a couple of concerts in the city and I had a free day between performances.

It was my cousin, Ghislaine de Valcros, who had prompted our meeting: an envelope containing a New Year greetings card, a reproduction of Lorenzo Lotto’s “Portrait of a Young Man”, had arrived in the post at my London flat shortly after New Year’s Day, forwarded by my agent to whom the card had been addressed. It expressed good wishes for the coming year in a conventional way, and enclosed the following note, written in English on the letterhead of a well-known French weekly magazine:

Dear William

I hope you will forgive this sudden communication à l’improviste, or “out of the blue” as I think you say. Our family history is complicated and mysterious to me, but I hope you will agree that it’s about time we met and tried to understand the past and our families’ complicated relationships after all these years of not communicating. I am particularly keen to do so because a few weeks ago my mother, Madeleine de Launay, received a letter and several packets of what she describes as “family archives” from Henry Latymer – your grandfather, she told me, and her first husband – who, it appears, has been living in Buenos Aires for some years. He wrote to tell her that he feared he had not long to live, and this has clearly upset her, for it brings back memories of what she calls a “personal tragedy” that she had hoped to leave in the past. She says she will now once again be obliged to confront certain matters relating to her younger life that she has done her best to forget, so she has suggested that I try to discover your whereabouts and get in touch with a view to deciding what we might do with these papers.

Making contact has not been easy; the only clue my mother could provide was the address of a Miss Latymer (“his sister, if she’s still alive”) of Bourne House, Much Birch, Herefordshire. Alas, my letter to her, posted three or four weeks ago, was returned “not known at this address”. Through the British Consulate, I then managed to find out the name of the present owner of Bourne House and I wrote again. A Colonel Thwaite replied by return, informing me that neither Miss Latymer, nor her nephew Theo, who used to visit her there and whom he had met, was alive. Apparently, Lavinia Latymer had been a neighbour and a friend of his family, but she had died in a nearby nursing home shortly after he had moved to Bourne House in 1988. Theo, her nephew – and, I now realise, your father – had also died, but several years before her. He suggested I write to you (“I assume him to be the sole surviving offspring of that ill-fated family”), and although he had no idea of where you live, he was able to give me the name of the chamber group you play with because he said he had been to a concert given by your quartet last year in Hereford Cathedral.

Bref . . . it has involved some astute detective work, but I trust I have now tracked down the real William Latymer, and I very much hope that you will get in touch with me.

Affectionately, your cousin (as it were) Ghislaine

In her letter was her Paris telephone number and an address in the 6ème arrondissement. I immediately rang my mother to find out whether she knew anything about my newly discovered relative, but she was not helpful:

“I never asked Theo about that side of the family, darling. Talking about the past used to upset him too much. I think it was due to his unhappy childhood, which he tried to forget, and to being brought up by his aunt in rural Herefordshire. ‘Please don’t bring all that up again, Jane,’ he would beg me whenever I asked any questions, and so I didn’t.”

I telephoned Ghislaine, told her that her card and letter had just been forwarded to me, and that, as it happened, my quartet was scheduled to play in a chamber concert at the little church of St-Julien-le-Pauvre in a few weeks’ time. Naturally, I would very much like to meet her and, should she be free, perhaps she might like to come.



After an absence of almost two years, I found myself in Paris. Glints of wintry sunshine were shimmering over the Seine and the dark towers of the Conciergerie were reflected in the eddying waters as I crossed the Pont Neuf and made my way to Ghislaine’s office in rue du Louvre.

I felt light-headed, I remember; Paris has many moods, but the city was at its most intoxicating that morning. Passing the ancient church of St-Germain-l’Auxerrois, I looked in to offer a brief prayer and to examine the stained glass, but a choir of schoolchildren and their teacher were rehearsing, and I felt like an intruder.

Ghislaine’s office was at the top of a six-storey building, her magazine being part of a long-established newspaper group. I should have made an appointment. She was in a meeting with the editor, her colleague informed me, but if I could wait fifteen minutes . . . I sat down and surveyed her office. There were shelves of new books, recently arrived from the publishers, to judge by their pristine state, which had been divided into fiction and various other categories. Jutting out of the top of each book’s spine was a white card on which was written what I took to be the date of publication. Her desk suggested mild pandemonium: there was a clutter of papers everywhere, scribbled notes, press releases and letters covered every available surface, and more books were piled up in columns on the floor around it. One of the two telephones tinkled softly, but someone on another extension must have answered it. I stood up and gazed out of the window, which looked out over the Banque de France building.

“Tiens! ” a voice said with a laugh. “You must be William Latymer. I had not expected you quite so soon.”

I turned around. Walking towards me was a tall woman in her early to mid-thirties, I imagined. She was smiling and she held out both hands to me in a gesture of welcome. Large brown eyes shone beneath fair, almost blond hair that framed her neck and fell loosely over her navy-blue cardigan and square shoulders. She wore little make-up and her open lips revealed very white teeth.

I was taken aback and mumbled something to the effect that I was delighted to meet a cousin I never knew existed.

“I would have recognised you straight away. Maman has a photograph of your grandfather taken during the war,” she said in very slightly accented English as we embraced and brushed cheeks. “There’s a clear family likeness, one has to say.”

Ghislaine wore tight black trousers that emphasised her slimness and she exuded an air of bustling vivacity. Beneath her simple white blouse she wore a gold chain.

“Well, I’m very pleased you got in touch,” I stammered, still taken aback by the effect of her physical appearance.

Ghislaine picked up one of the two telephones on her cluttered desk and asked for some coffee to be brought.

“Yes, we are cousins, but it may be more complicated than that,” she said. “Perhaps I’m also some sort of aunt. You see, you are the son of the child of my mother’s first marriage, while I am the daughter of her second. Your father would have been my half-brother, in other words. What does that make us?”

Still standing, she laughed and patted my arm. Her whole body seemed to quiver in amusement and, looking back now, I’m convinced I fell in love with her in that instant. Her voice, her infectious laughter, her total naturalness, the delicacy with which she moved, her sheer physicality . . .

“William?”

“It’s Will,” I said. “Everyone calls me Will.”

Her eyes held my gaze.

“Well, Will, can you spare a few days to come to Brittany to meet Maman? As I told you when I wrote, the letter my mother received from your grandfather – a man she had not seen since 1945, believe it or not – distressed her very much, and, since then, I am sorry to have to tell you, there has been a further letter from a woman friend of Henry’s – Rosita Suarez, I think that was her name – informing Maman that Henry had died three weeks ago in a Buenos Aires hospice. So, sad news. Yet I’m sure it would give my mother great pleasure to meet you. And I could certainly do with your help sorting out these so-called family archives he sent.”

Ghislaine raised her eyes to heaven in a gesture of disbelief.

“It seems that they consist of personal diaries and a few letters, all pertaining to the war years and their time together. You see, whatever Madeleine – that’s my mother’s name, by the way – whatever she may have once felt for this poor Henry, your grandfather, it is clear that she does not wish to be reminded about a chapter of her life – those sad and desperate wartime years – that she had successfully repressed. Over time, she has told me something about her past. She has told me a little about Henry and his life in France during the war, and also about their son Theo, your father, who, to her obvious sadness and shame, she barely knew. It’s clear that she has always felt guilty about him and about so much besides . . .”

She paused.

“Anyway, she believes that if these archives deserve to belong to anyone, they should belong to Theo, but since you say he is no longer alive – and I’m sorry to hear this about your father – then they should be yours.”

I told her that she knew more about Henry than I did. All I had ever discovered about my grandfather was the fact that he had been educated at the same school that both my father and I had been at, and also that he was somehow persona non grata, a so-called black sheep of the family, who had disappeared in South America some years before I had been born. I said that he had abandoned his English family and that his son had never received so much as a single letter or postcard from him.

“Neither Henry’s name, nor my father’s, Theo, was ever mentioned at home,” I said, “and no records or photographs of them appear to exist.”

My first meeting with my cousin was memorable for me, but it did not last long, barely half an hour. She was due to attend a literary prize-giving at a Left Bank restaurant and her taxi dropped me off at my hotel on rue de Seine. She agreed to come to our chamber concert the following evening, and I told her that I would be delighted to stay a few extra days and accompany her to Brittany next weekend to meet the grandmother I never knew I had.



I always stay at the Louisiane when I’m in Paris, if only for sentimental reasons. It is not the most comfortable of hotels, but I like to think of figures such as Henry Miller and Ezra Pound staying there in the years between the wars. There is still a lingering louche whiff of a hôtel de passe, and of what I imagine Paris to have been like in the immediate post-war period, with those cobbled streets, open-backed buses and the faces that you see in Brassaï’s photographs. When I first visited the city, shortly after leaving school, there was an elderly White Russian who was employed there as a night porter. He had escaped from Minsk at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution and he would sit at his little kiosk in the lobby of the hotel that had been his home since 1921. He was an incorrigible optimist and in the evenings he used to strum melancholy tunes on his balalaika. He remembered “Monsieur Durrell et Monsieur Miller, bien sûr,” he once told me in his fluent but harshly guttural French, and he appeared to have known all that existentialist beau monde who had met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in the late 1940s and ’50s.

That afternoon and most of the following one were spent rehearsing at St-Julien-le-Pauvre. Once inside its walls, you step back eight hundred years and there are few places where the anxieties of modern life slip away quite so effectively as they do amid the mysterious silence of the church’s thick, damp-stained walls and stout pillars. I tried to imagine the chant of medieval monks in the days before its Romanesque vaults and interior were altered, when scholars from the Sorbonne attended daily Mass here. I thought of Abelard and Heloïse. I wondered by what miracle it had survived the Revolution intact and how it came to be a haven of reassurance during those turbulent times and during the dark days of German military occupation.

That evening, however, no-one was at prayer. The ancient church was transformed into a modern temple of culture, and the audience was still scrambling noisily for seats as the four of us – our leader, Gunnar Lowenskjold, Jean MacGuire, who plays the viola, our cellist Celia Elmhirst, and I – took our bows. As we tuned our instruments, I scanned the church and the faces of the ninety or so people who had come to hear us. I thought I could make out Ghislaine in the very back of the church, but her features were indistinct.

We played three pieces that evening: a Haydn string quartet, Shostakovich’s rarely performed and starkly brooding 7th string quartet, and, after a short interval, the Mendelssohn B-minor quartet. The performance was received not rapturously, as is usually the case in London, but with polite, restrained enthusiasm.

Ghislaine was indeed in the audience and she was waiting for me after the concert. She took me to dinner at a small restaurant off rue des Écoles that was known for its bouillabaisse. The owner, a Marseillais, greeted Ghislaine like an old friend and sat us facing one another in a corner by a window. I felt elated: by the music, by the air of Paris on this wintry evening, but most of all by my newly discovered cousin. She sat very upright at the table, her hands in constant motion as she spoke in a light-hearted, dizzying flow of French and English phrases, switching from one language to the other for no apparent reason, using hybrid “franglais” words and interspersing her conversation with bubbling peals of laughter. Her manner was more urbane and self-assured than it had been when we met in her office, and there was a confiding intimacy about her conversation that I found intoxicating.

“Don’t you love this city?” she asked, wiping the condensation off the window and peering out into the darkened street. “I love its moods and its constantly changing beauty, but I wish they would stop destroying it. Deep down, I suppose, it’s the nineteenth-century Paris that I love. The city of the Goncourts, of Balzac and Flaubert. But it’s still the most elegant place in the world, don’t you agree, whatever they do to it, whatever the passing fashions.”

She held out her hands and shrugged simultaneously. Then, in a flash, her mood changed. She looked me in the eyes and placed one hand on mine.

“What about you, Will?” she asked. “Tell me. You don’t speak about yourself much. Tell me something about your life in London, about the music you play.”

And so, flattered by her apparent interest in me and fortified by some good red wine, I held forth. Habitually gauche and introverted where my own feelings are concerned, that night I felt liberated and unburdened, for I found myself describing not just my daily existence as a musician in London, but revealing to her most of what had happened to me since my father’s death during my second year at music college in London.

“So tell me about your father – this mysterious Theo, a half-brother I never knew. I want to know, I really do,” Ghislaine urged.

My father had always been such a distant, remote figure to me. He never talked about the past or about his childhood. It was as if there had been some deep black hole in his early life over which he had tried to draw a veil. He seldom displayed affection and, disloyal though it may sound, I have never quite understood what it was about him that appealed to my mother, or why she married him. I suppose that in his quiet, diffident way he was a good father, but he always seemed to me to be a man who had had to re-invent himself, someone with no identity, or at least an identity he had succeeded in burying.

I told Ghislaine just about all that I knew of our family history, with all its gaps, that evening. I knew that my father, Theo, had been sent from Europe towards the end of the war by his French mother and his English father and taken to Britain as a baby from Copenhagen, where he had been born in 1945, by my great-aunt Lavinia. She more or less adopted him, treated him as her own son, and educated him.

Theo’s early childhood, I explained, had been spent in the Herefordshire village to which Ghislaine’s letter to me had been addressed.

“When he was dispatched at the age of thirteen to be a boarder at a Jesuit public school on the banks of the Thames, near Windsor – a school that I and, as I discovered at the time from photographs of sports teams in the school corridors, my grandfather had also attended – Lavinia moved north to Scotland, and only returned to Herefordshire in her late sixties. She had always loved the novels of Walter Scott and the Border country, and so she chose as her new home a stone-built Victorian villa on the outskirts of a former mill town on the banks of the River Tweed. Theo spent his holidays there, fishing, birdwatching, walking and – his chief passion – making music. He was evidently solitary by nature; his health was poor and he was a painfully shy and deeply introspective boy.

“In due course, Theo was accepted as a music scholar at Edinburgh University. He had taken up the French horn in his school orchestra and very soon acquired a reasonable mastery of the instrument that set him apart from his musical peers.

“It was as a student in Edinburgh that Theo had first met my mother while playing in the university orchestra. She was a competent violinist herself, and she was much more adept at drawing Theo out of his brooding introspection than anyone he had ever met before. She is one of those brisk, confident, no-nonsense women who always seem to be able to take a positive view of life’s problems. She has a wide circle of friends, many interests, and she has coped all too easily with her comparatively early widowhood. She is never short of an opinion, and I’ve rarely seen her dismayed or crestfallen.

“Two years after Theo and Jane had graduated and played together in a farewell performance of Britten’s ‘Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings’ that had elicited eulogies from the staff of the Music department as well as from the critic of the Scotsman, they were married. The ceremony was carried out at the pretty Jesuit church in Lauriston Place on a damp November morning, my mother remembered, when the wind blustered through the Edinburgh streets, rattled at the church doors during the nuptial Mass, and almost blew off her veil as she stepped into the bridal car. They spent their honeymoon on Iona.

“Should I go on?” I asked Ghislaine, aware that it was late and the restaurant was emptying.

“But you must, Will. I find this fascinating.”

“By marrying into a respectable New Town family,” I continued, “Theo took his place in Edinburgh society, and my parents set up their first home in the top-floor flat of an austere, soot-blackened Georgian terrace house that seemed to be inhabited solely by old men – ‘solemn, upright former advocates and retired colonels who wore tweed caps, darling, you know the sort!’ was how I remember my mother putting it.

“I was born in that stern, precipitous city, and whenever I return to what I still think of as home, I rejoice in a sense of belonging, a reassuring and consoling permanence, as I contemplate those mournful churches, the dignified squares and sober terraces, and feel the damp haar seep into my bones. There is a certain awe about Edinburgh, a weight of history, which we lack in our more sanitised southern English cities.

“Yet my father never belonged to the city in the way my mother and I did. Indeed, I doubt whether he felt he belonged anywhere. When she could be persuaded to talk about him, Mother always maintained that he was an orphan of the Second World War, a child who had been deserted and dispossessed, one of the casualties of mid-twentieth-century European history. He always bore the attitudes of a foreigner, of an outsider, she said. Despite his British education, it was as if, at an early stage in his life, he had decided to create a new persona for himself, to build a shell within which he could protect himself from what seemed to him to be a hostile outside world and from the buffetings that had shaped and damaged his early life. Although my father remained devoted to his surrogate mother, his Aunt Lavinia, throughout his short life, he never could understand why the God to whom both he and she prayed had deprived him of both his real parents.

“And when I look at the photograph of my mother and father that stands on the bookcase in my London flat, I see a man who must have been in constant retreat from life. Theo and Jane do not look like a couple who belonged together or who sustained one another: my mother’s expression is set in an all-encompassing grin; her youthful dark beauty radiates confidence and faith in the future, she knows what she is about and where she is going; but my father does not look at the camera; there is a withdrawn, soulful air about him, and his hollowed cheeks and prematurely bald head suggest suffering and resignation.

“Perhaps music was his only real consolation. It was certainly one of the few interests he and I had in common, and it may have been the only true love that my parents shared. The sounds of strings and brass echo through my childhood and as I cast my mind back I can see that it was inevitable I should have become a musician myself. It was not that either of my parents was insistent about this; it was simply a foregone conclusion that I should persevere with a modus vivendi that each of them saw as a privilege and a duty.

“‘Your talent with the violin is inherited from your mother, but it is God-given, boy. Use it!’ was one of the few conventionally fatherly remarks I recall him making from the time that I used to attend Mrs Belinsky’s violin lessons in a back street near the Royal Botanic Garden in the years before I was sent south to boarding school. Practice and music lessons were part of a ritual that I never questioned, at least until I left home, and when the time came to decide upon a career there seemed no sensible alternative.”

I had rarely talked quite so much and I apologised to Ghislaine. She took my hands in both of hers.

“Poor Theo,” she said. “My mother found it hard to say anything at all about him when I once asked her. It was as if her son, whom she had abandoned when he was a baby, belonged to another life. It is something that has always haunted her. He was her lovechild – a victim of history, like so many of his generation, I imagine. A victim of our century, at least. I don’t mean the fact th. . .