Free Cloudless May by Storm Jameson

believed in. She felt heavy with her faults, lies, cowardice, greed. Nothing in her was sound except her love for Émile, her ambitions for Émile, her pleasure in Émile. . . . She moved, drawing away her arm.

Chapter 8
    Lucien Sugny took his morning coffee on to the north terrace. The sun—it was not seven o’clock yet—was already the same no-colour, the colour of molten heat, as the sky. Light sprang back from the roofs of houses at the foot of the cliff, from the Loire itself, and ripples of light were beginning to mask the town and the fields beyond the town. Lucien thought, as he did every morning at this time, that his life was perfect: he would have run the length of the terrace if he had not been afraid that even out here, at this hour, he could be seen. He sat still, the figure of a sober secretary. . . . Seuilly had been taken by the Germans—except the Prefecture, which was holding out on its cliff: his job was to fire off the machine-gun at the head of the slope while the Prefect and Mme de Freppel, in the dress she had worn at dinner, slipped away. He was wounded. She came running back—Lucien, you’re hurt!—No, Marguerite, I’m dying. Or should it be, No, I’m dying, Madame . . .? Her lips brushed his, she leaned her warm body along his, rapidly growing cold . . . You could invent something more original, he thought angrily. Need you, because you’re not a soldier, become an idiot?
    He rushed indoors and switched on the wireless in time to hear the communiqué. A patrol encounter east of the Moselle ended to our advantage. There have been more artillery actions east of the Vosges. The German High Command states that two British planes were brought down in the North Sea. . . . That was all. Except for the French and the Germans, the two invariable actors, Europe had nothing it wanted to say: there were no signals from Norway: in Spain, no Republican peasants had been released from prison to work in the olive fields; the Italians, except an orator who demanded Marseilles, because it was Roman—why not the whole of France, to the Loire?—were quiet; Poland and Czechoslovakia were as quiet as death. All Europe—apart from a patch of ground near the Moselle, another in the Vosges, and an undefined patch of the North Sea—was perfectly peaceful; men stretching themselves in the early sun, women moving about their houses. . . . Lucienswitched off. He went out again. The sunlight tickled the back of his neck; he turned round to feel its fingers on his face . . . What am I missing by staying here? Obviously nothing.
    Later in the morning, Mme de Freppel came into his room from the Prefect’s. He jumped up, dropping a file of papers; it opened, they slid over the floor and he had to stoop, knocking his glasses off on the edge of the chair. He groped for them with a cry of horror.
    â€œAre they broken?” Mme de Freppel asked.
    â€œI don’t know. No. Thank heaven.”
    â€œBut, child, they could have been mended,” she said, laughing at him.
    Lucien did not care to explain that by the time he had sent two-thirds of his small salary to his mother to help her with the younger children, what was left scarcely mended his shoes and bought him half an hour at a café twice a week. There was no virtue in his generosity; it was habit; before he could speak, when he was cutting his teeth on his father’s clumsy silver watch, he had noticed that everything went round in the family circle. He blinked politely at Mme de Freppel, then put his glasses on and saw her clearly again. She was still beautiful. And he had nothing to give her. He looked at the window and offered her the immense bell of the sky tolling sunlight, with the branches of the magnolia across the dusty panes and half-open shutters.
    â€œA magnificent day.”
    â€œYou ought to be outside,” Mme de Freppel said kindly.
    Did she mean he ought to be in the army? But