The Girl in the Blue Beret - Bobbie Ann Mason [131]
“You’ll be right there if we fall off the mountain?” Marshall joked.
“Absolutely,” Roland said. “We never permit our guests to jump!”
“We’ll be O.K.,” said Marshall, wondering what the young people made of his age.
After dinner, Annette wanted to go outdoors. She said she didn’t mind her legs being bare, but she got cold around her neck and chest. He dashed upstairs for their jackets.
She was chatting with Roland when Marshall returned to the lobby, but she said a quick smiling au revoir to the guide. Marshall held her jacket for her, taking care as she slipped each arm into its sleeve. He had brought their berets. They walked out the side door, past the parking spaces, and sat on a small ledge across from the church. There was no sign of a wedding, and the accordion music had ended. They could see lights far down the valley. An intermittent, moving flash in the distance seemed to be a car driving up the road they had come.
The foothills made Marshall think of the squeezed-together hills of Kentucky, which could trap the smoke from someone’s woodstove and send it circling through the holler, the scent lingering until morning.
“The mountains are bothering you,” Annette said again. She ran her hand along his arm reassuringly.
“Mountains are deceptive,” he said. He stopped her hand with his. “There’s no horizon—no level land to get your bearings. And the perspective keeps changing. There’s no objective view.”
“Is there ever, anywhere?”
“I always want things to be clear,” he said. “I get impatient if they aren’t.”
“You would not be impatient behind the wheel of an airplane. You must have been a very precise pilot.”
“Yoke, not wheel.”
“Oh, pardon, monsieur.” She was teasing him. “Just be with me,” she said. “Isn’t this good? We have the night. There is no war. My dog is safe with Anne and Georges.”
“Did you name your son for Georges Broussine?”
“Bien sûr.”
“Does your son know?”
“Oh, yes. However, I think the original Georges may be a little embarrassed.”
“A modest man, you say.”
“Yes.” She laid her hand on his knee.
“I named my son Albert,” he said. “After the family that helped me in Chauny.”
“Yes, you told me.”
“The name means ‘courage.’ ”
The waning moon resembled a hat hanging in the sky. He pointed it out to her.
“A beret,” she said.
“Aren’t you glad I bought this chic headgear from the stall on the rue de Rivoli?”
“Yes. My beret is warm,” she said.
“It feels strange to be in the Pyrenees again,” he said after a moment. The rocky peaks were out there, somewhere in the dark.
“Tell me about the time before,” she said. “I know it has been on your mind.”
He stared into the darkness, toward Spain.
“What are you seeing?” she asked. “I would like to know.”
A meteor dashed silently across the sky then.
58.
MARSHALL GAZED AT THE SKY AS HE BEGAN TO SPEAK.
“When I crossed the Pyrenees in ’44, I thought if I could just get to the summit, it would be like flying. To get back to my base, I was prepared to face whatever dangers lay ahead. The train was the first hurdle. I think Robert was my guide on the train.”
“Yes. After Perpignan, he had begun making journeys to Pau.”
“And there was a girl, a girl with blond pigtails.”
“I think that was my friend Hélène. She was two years older than me, and she had an aunt in Montauban, so she could travel on the pretext that her aunt was sick. Her parents didn’t know she was résistante!”
“The night train to Toulouse was miserably slow. The tracks had been sabotaged in several places. Now and then the train jolted on a bad roadbed, and sometimes we stopped for a long time. It was hard to stay awake. I had to be fully alert, but I was dead tired and miserable. It was dark and the windows were covered, so we couldn’t see the terrain. I carried a newspaper—the one your mother had pressed into my knapsack before I left to meet you.”
“At the Jardin des Plantes.”
“Yes. I went there last week. Didn’t I tell you?”
“Oui, oui.”
“In the daylight