Mon Dieu, thought Bruno. That Last Post worked so well we’ll have to make it

part of the annual ceremony. He looked around at the crowd, beginning to drift

away, and saw that young Philippe Delaron, who usually wrote the sports report

for the Sud-Ouest newspaper, had his notebook out and was talking to Monsieur

Jackson and his grandson. Well, a small notice in the newspaper about a genuine

British ally taking part in the Victory parade could do no harm now that so many

English were buying homes in the Commune. It might even encourage them to

complain less about their various property taxes and the price of water for

their swimming pools. Then he noticed something rather odd. After every previous

parade, whether it was for the eighth of May, for the eleventh of November when

the Great War ended, on the eighteenth of June when de Gaulle launched Free

France, or the fourteenth of July when France celebrated her Revolution,

Jean-Pierre and Bachelot would turn away from each other without so much as a

nod and walk back separately to the Mairie to store the flags they carried. But

this time they were standing still, staring fixedly at one another. Not talking,

but somehow communicating. Amazing what one bugle call can do, thought Bruno.

Maybe if I can get some Americans into the parade next year they might even

start talking, and leave one another’s wives alone. But now it was thirty

minutes after midday and, like every good Frenchman, Bruno’s thoughts turned to

his lunch.

He walked back across the bridge with Marie-Louise, who was still weeping as he

gently took her flag from her. The Mayor, and Monsieur Jackson and his daughter

and grandson were close behind. Karim and his family walked ahead, and

Jean-Pierre and Bachelot, with their almost identical wives, brought up the

rear, marching in grim silence as the town band, without its best trumpeter,

played another song from the war that had the power to melt Bruno: J’attendrai.

It was the song of the women of France in 1940, as they watched their men march

off to a war that turned into six weeks of disaster and five years of prison

camps. ‘… day and night, I shall wait always, for your return.’ The history of

France was measured out in songs of war, he thought, many sad and some heroic,

but each verse heavy with its weight of loss.

The crowd was thinning as they turned off to lunch, most of the mothers and

children going home, but some families making an event of of the day and turning

into Jeannot’s bistro beyond the Mairie, or the pizza house beyond the bridge.

Bruno would normally have gone with some friends to Ivan’s café for his plat du

jour, usually a steak-frites – except for the time when Ivan fell in love with a

Belgian girl staying at a local camp site and, for three glorious and passionate

months until she packed up and went back to Charleroi, steak-frites became

moules-frites. Then there was no plat du jour at all for weeks until Bruno had

taken the grieving Ivan out and got him heroically drunk.

But today was a special day, and so the Mayor had organised a déjeuner d’honneur

for those who had played a part in the parade. Now they climbed the ancient

stairs, bowed in the middle by centuries of feet, to the top floor of the Mairie

which held the council chamber and, on occasions such as this, doubled as the

banquet room. The town’s treasure was a long and ancient table that served

council and banquet alike, and was said to have been made for the grand hall of

the chateau of the Brillamont family itself in those happier days before their

Seigneur kept getting captured by the English. Bruno began counting; twenty

places were laid for lunch. He scanned the room to see who his fellow diners

might be.

There was the Mayor with his wife, and Jean-Pierre and Bachelot with their

wives, who automatically went to opposite ends of the room. For the first time,

Karim and his wife Rashida had been invited, and stood chatting to Montsouris

the Communist and his dragon of a wife who was even more left-wing than her

husband. Monsieur Jackson and Sylvie the baker and her son were talking to

Rollo, the local headmaster, who sometimes played tennis with Bruno, and the

music teacher, who was the conductor of the town band, and also the master of

the church choir. He had expected to see the new captain of the local gendarmes,

but there was no sign of the man. The plump and sleek Father Sentout, priest of

the ancient church of St Denis who was aching to become a Monsignor, emerged

puffing from the new elevator. He was pointedly not talking to his lift

companion, the formidable Baron, a retired industrialist who was the main local

landowner. Bruno nodded at him. He was a fervent atheist and also Bruno’s

regular tennis partner.

Fat Jeanne from the market appeared with a tray of champagne glasses, swiftly

followed by young Claire, the Mayor’s secretary, who carried an enormous tray of

amuse-bouches that she had made herself. Claire had a tendresse for Bruno, and

she’d talked to him of little else for weeks, leaving the Mayor’s letters

untyped as she thumbed through Madame Figaro and Marie-Claire to seek ideas and

recipes. The result, thought Bruno as he surveyed the offerings of celery filled