A Legend of the Great War

She returned to the sofa beside him, and they talked far into the night, while the fire in the hearth died to a red glow. His companion leant back on the sofa, her head turned towards him.

'Andrew, it is late, and this room gets cold.'

'Oh, I should be going, and let you get to bed.'

'Andrew, you don't have much to do with girls, I think?'

'Well…' Andrew told her about the Belgian girl, about the girl with the white feather in Trafalgar Square, about Susan Shepperd, and of his uncertainty about what all that might mean.

'She doesn't sound right for you, that one. She doesn't sound right for herself.'

'How do you mean?'

'Where is the passion?

'She was passionate about some things. Votes for women.'

Andrew's companion said something quite sulphurous about votes for women, which Andrew never could find in any dictionary, although he realised almost in panic that they had been speaking French without difficulty for half the evening. Had he said anything stupider than he knew?

'You see? No passion. Don't think no passion is safe, Andrew. A person is like a boat, which you can steer while there is power. But with no power it feels so safe, and yet it drifts till you hit something really bad.'

'And you, madame, you haven't drifted.'

'Mademoiselle, remember, all my people call me. No, I ' ave not drifted, quite.'

'Mademoiselle. Maybe the price for this life you've made, is to be alone.'

'You notice that? Among all my friends? You are not so stupid, you. Andrew, I am thirty-two, and you are young enough to be my son.'

Did Andrew see a tear glisten in her eye?

'No, I'm not. I'm seventeen. I feel it sometimes.'

'Young enough in Belleville. Andrew, do you believe what people say, that a woman like me becomes incapable of love?'

'I didn't know they said it. I suppose some must be. For so are some of anybody.'

'Now there is a truth. Can I tell you something those animals of last night do not know? I advise my girls to give themselves just a few times a year, only for their art and forla France, tosimples soldats who risk their lives for our country. For me, it is not so often. I must be alone, maybe until after what I now am is forgotten. There can only bepetites aventures sans fin – interludes of love. But I love only to my invisible line, like the absinthe, and never, a thousand times never, withmes supplicants - those who would seek me out for what the world can see, like atrophée de chasse for their walls. My past is like your medal. Both bring the trophy-hunters, and I don't hate your silly Susan, for our best friends are the people who listen, but are unimpressed. People who don't think that you are your little piece of brown metal, or that I am… I am that easy way upstairs to a woman's bedroom, without the danger of wasting an evening in conversation. You understand?'

'I think so. I could waste a lot of evenings this way, before I'd complain.'

'Andrew, they have made you grow up very quickly, in some ways, and I think people like you will sufferaprès la guerre finie, for being a boy one moment, and a man the next. Better you learn quickly about girls too, but very important you learn with a little love, just enough to be civilized. Better you stay 'ere tonight.'

The bedroom was still in half-light on that winter's morning, when Andrew awoke, and realised he had been awoken by the old hunter's trick of a finger pressed gently under his ear.

'Time for breakfast,' she said. 'You said you must be with your regiment by ten. You are 'appy?'

'Oh yes. I can't say how much.'

It was only the truth. She was wearing that same light, lacy robe now, and he remembered her golden nakedness as it slipped from her shoulders, the revelation that a mere human body could be as beautiful as the nude statues in the Kelvingrove art gallery, and the passion which had racked her body and his. There had been no time for the fear, the unmanning fear, he used to imagine might have. For as she drew aside his own robe, he knew he was a man. It was not the rising column of coral tipped with porphyry, at which she had nodded sagely, and smiled as she touched him with those long, cool fingers. Nor was it the realisation that although he would never be tall or muscular, the last year and a half had made him as fit, in an all-round manner, as anyone could be. It was to see and value what was in a woman, that made a man.

'I didn't know there was so much to learn,' he said. 'I thought it was something that people just went ahead and did.'

'Then you know something a lot of men grow old without knowing,' she said. 'You must observe what the woman truly feels, and you 'ave to learn a big part of it again for every person, because it is different.'

'I wasn't thinking of doing this with many.'

'I know that. If you do it with too many people you don' care about, you become a forty-year-old, tobacco-smelling Englishcommandant with…' Lost for words, which Andrew thought rare in her, she picked up a sort of pancake, and allowed it to fall limp. 'Believe me, we see much of this. But if you do it with as many women as truly care for you, maybe without serious intentions but without deception, that will never be too many. Can I tell you something?'

'Of course. I'm not sure how I could say no.'

'Oh,touché! Well, making love is never dirty, if it is for making love.'

'Pardon?'

'I mean if it is not to dominate, not to impress people, not to avoid uncertainty, not for the children, not for a home, not to have your shirts ironed, not becausec'est la coutume. Those things are the dirtiness, but this strange thing we do is clean, and it is never cleaner than when your heart goes out to a new woman, if you don' 'ave to betray the last. What would a little man from Mars think, tell me, if he finds out 'ow we make babies 'ere on earth? I believe 'e would wonder why do it more often than we have babies, most of us.'

'He'd probably think we were tremendously public-spirited, to go to all that trouble.'

Mademoiselle dissolved again in gallic mirth.

'I wasn't… immature, or anything?'

'Andrew, did you feel immature last night?'

'Well, no…'

'You were an artist, you can't imagine 'ow much. Do you know, a lot of men make love only once in a night?'

'Oh, I can't believe that. Don't they like it?'

'Not as much as you did, I think. So strong, so sensitive… so beautiful… and taller than I am, by a good two centimetres, don't you know? When you look at me, I think my picture is printed inside your eyes. A soldier can't choose where to go, I know that, but I 'ope you come to see me when you can. Then you will meet, someday, the girl who will be everything for always, to you, and her you must never, never betray. I will rejoice to hear of it, an' you will 'ave the best aunt in the world, even if you think it better we don' meet again.'

'Well, I can't imagine…'

'Oh yes you will, and if you learn all this, things that tobacco-smellingcommandant may never learn, I don' 'ave to feel guilty for snatching from the cradle… There was nocommandant, you know. I made him up for example.'

'I knew that.'

'Ah, now they bring breakfast.'

His uniform was waiting, still warm from pressing, and as immaculate as it had been at the investiture so long ago. She led him through the throng of giggling females, and while they ate croissants and drank coffee as the light grew in the eastern sky, she told him unimaginable things about women. As they got up, she gave him a paper packet containing the brocaded robe her brother had sent from Indo-China, and he wondered if that was because it had not been earned by her business. He realised that he did not know whether she sold herself to her clients, or just managed the others. But that was a distinction he dismissed as unworthy of himself and of her. She was Mademoiselle.

She stopped short of the gate, as she kissed him and pressed his hand between hers. He wondered, as he rounded the corner, to see a plate and coffee bowl, just like the ones they had used, on the gatepost. Then a familiar figure detached itself from the hedge.

'Ye're looking' grand, Andrew.' said Colin Ross. 'I'm thinkin' your education agrees wi' you. We'll make roll-call if we step oot.'

They marched off down that tree-lined street, with Colin Ross humming the tinkly little French air which, by some obscure process will live forever as 'Mademoiselle from Armentières'. But the words you usually hear were none of his, and he was later to call them gross, and most likely Canadian.

Andrew is alive still, and counts confidently on being the last of the twenty who remember those terrible days, although he says that if it costs him his life to sit in the Lords once a year, it is only what he owes. Andrew's old house of Lochgowan is a tranquil place but not a lonely one, for he is rich in memories and descendents, and a list of his friends would read like a roll of honour of our world. Nostalgia is a living force within him, and yet he seldom enthuses about the good old days, for he knows well that they were dreadful old days, most of the time.

He is a soldier still, for field-marshals never retire. Historians will say he earned his keep in those ten minutes of silent thought and two minutes of densely-packed orders which doomed Manstein's last breakthrough. He will tell you that if a Black Watch recruiting-sergeant's newspaper had not been yesterday's, it might never have happened. But the Army remembers him asThe Man who Knew Mademoiselle from Armentières. Colin Ross being a close-mouthed man, Andrew has never learned how the story got out.

Lady Dunbar, who had always loved her, was with him when that mysterious old French lady received the Resistance Medal from General de Gaulle's hand, in 1961. She was more jealous of Jenny of Aldershot, whose letter she found in that greatcoat pocket, somewhere around 1975.