Free Tsing-Boum by Nicolas Freeling Page B

solidarity of men who had crouched in the mud on Eliane and looked out on Giap’s hills.
    Once could not, of course, place too much trust in the badge. Esther had been a nurse, Esther had had many soldiers in her hands and in her arms.
    Arlette had seen it all.
    Van der Valk stopped dead. Had Esther herself been at Dien Bien Phu? Zomerlust’s words echoed in his head.
    â€˜Called ipsas or something – airborne nurse; she’d had parachute training.’
    A nurse had won fame at the place – Geneviève de Galard, who had been unable to leave when the airstrip came under the direct fire of Giap’s artillery. She had stayed throughout the siege, at Dr Grauwin’s side. But she had been alone. What other woman had been there? Brigitte Friang, most celebrated of women war correspondents, who had been under fire more times than he had had hot cups of tea. But she had left before the siege, and had been forbidden to parachute into the camp once it had started. Paule Bourgeade, Castries’s secretary, had been flown back to Hanoi on the second day of the siege, at Castries’s express order.
    There were to be sure the Ouled Naïl girls, but about them both legend and – unsurprisingly – official accounts were vague. Certainly there had been no nurses, apart from Geneviève de Galard, but nurses had continued to fly in and out as long as they could.
    Why was the name of Dien Bien Phu a talisman that should surround the doings of Esther Marx, in France, with a feeling of embarrassment? More important, were these people who proposed to call on him tomorrow there to tell him the truth, or to tell him lies? Everything to do with Dien Bien Phu attracted lies, and there were still too many unanswered questions. Why this, why that, like the other list of strange fatalities that had lost Waterloo.
    At home he put his stick away, with a secret message of sympathy for Colonel de Castries, in whom something had broken that first day when Beatrice fell and the first of his ‘mistresses’ changed her lover.
    Esther, did you too change your lover? Why were you shot down, so abruptly and efficiently?
    Van der Valk, before he slept, tried to recall the little rhyme about the matador. The fickle public in the tribunes, as ready to scream coward as to acclaim a hero. ‘But there is only one who knows, and he’s the one who plays the bull.’

Chapter Ten
    He woke up bleary, result of all this juvenile promenading in the small hours. He had to forget any irritability; Arlette would accept it ordinarily as part of life, but this morning she would be alert to any signs – go and have a hot shower. He had the hot shower, reflecting that she must have found the book, which he had left lying, and understood that he had solved his clue.
    It was agreeable how simply Ruth had found a place in the household – already she had her own place at the table and an old silver napkin-ring of Arlette’s. She knew that dressing-gowns and uncombed hair were frowned on at breakfast, that it was not allowed to read the paper, and that the washing-up was done and not stacked.
    â€˜I have a lot to do this morning, unfortunately. Perhaps you could see about Ruth’s school? She mustn’t lose any more days than she can help.’ He looked at the little girl, eating toast with that quiet air of wisdom. Too quiet, too good; she had accepted the whole break with the Van Lennepweg without a murmur, obediently falling in with the new life as though she had made up her mind to forget Esther. Had Esther done something of the sort? Why had she married Zomerlust, and gone to live ten uneventful years in a municipal flat in provincial Holland?
    â€˜Which do you like best – coffee or cocoa?’
    â€˜Coffee.’
    She called Arlette ‘Arlette’ and him ‘Monsieur’.
    â€˜Can’t have coffee every day. But definitely on Sundays, birthdays, fêtes and the Fourteenth