Chapter Eleven

After lunch, Theo took the mallet, wedge and saw and set to work on a pile of logs. Sabine obediently performed some chores for Micheline and then, pushing the wheelbarrow, she climbed up the hill to join her father.

‘I’ll take them down and stack them,’ she volunteered.

Theo paused to wipe his brow with his forearm. ‘Can you manage?’

‘I carried heavier loads than this when we had the pig-killing,’ said Sabine. She stacked the first load and trundled down the path with it.

‘You didn’t like the village school,’ Theo remarked when she returned. ‘How long were you there?’

‘Two years, until Suzie came. I didn’t mind it. I mean, it wasn’t like the convent, but it was all right.’

Theo found these unemphatic opinions hard to interpret.

‘He was a tough teacher, was he, Mr Vernhes? Was he any good?’

‘Yes, he was good. He made us all learn. Even the boys. Everyone was frightened of him.’

‘He used to thrash them, did he?’

For Sabine her father was an unknown quantity. Even before his wartime absence, when she was at the convent, she had rarely seen him. She had idealised both her parents when she had thought they were dead; now that her father had been resurrected, he did not live up to her imagination’s construction. Madame Ariane, as much as she detested her, understood what was said to her. In fact, it was a fault in her that she was so quick that little escaped her eye. Papa, she now realised, for all that he was so important according to the aunts, understood nothing. He had obviously interpreted Aunt Marguerite’s remarks about Vernhes’ beating the children as meaning that he beat the other children. It had simply never entered his head that the schoolmaster had beaten her. It was inconceivable to him. So what could one say to someone who understood nothing at all?

It was true that the village school had been all right. She had found it alarming at the beginning, especially the presence of boys. The big ones now stayed until they were fourteen. This improvement had been brought in by the Popular Front, she had been told, although the boys themselves, eager to get a man’s job, or needed on the farms, complained of the waste of their time. In the playground, as a newcomer, she was subject to some rough treatment at first. But she was so submissive that interest in tormenting her soon ceased. As she put on no airs and made no claims for herself, she was soon left alone. She had no friends.

Vernhes was another matter. He concentrated on the top class and she did not immediately encounter him. But she heard of his fearsome reputation, which kept the tyrants of the playground unmoving in their seats while he lectured them. They even liked him for it. He was ‘a good one’, she heard. He stood for no cheek and belted anyone who sauced him. When they at last came face to face they recognised one another at once. A bully, as her experiences with Antoinette and Sister Barbe had taught her, always knows a victim. And she felt the same trembling pleasure of being selected which she used to feel when Sister Barbe’s eyes rested on her in a thoughtful way.