Dazzle Patterns

by Dazzle Patterns (v5. 0) (epub)

  MRS. BIGGS WAS on the front porch looking frail when Clare arrived the next day. She took Clare’s hand in both of hers. “Thank you for finding her.”

  “She’s all right?” Clare asked.

  Mrs. Biggs’s hands flew like small birds to her neckline and hovered there. “I don’t know how she convinced that woman to …” She captured her hands and clasped them tight. “To get rid of a baby that wasn’t there. The police are still looking for her.”

  JANE HAD THROWN OFF her blankets. She was wearing a thin cotton nightdress with snow drops embroidered around the neck. “Clare,” she said, smiling. “All is well. I did the right thing. I really couldn’t take the baby to Paris.”

  Clare pulled the quilt up over her.

  After Jane fell asleep, Mrs. Biggs opened the night table drawer and dropped the bottle of laudanum into her dress pocket. Then she led the way downstairs.

  “The doctors confirmed, of course. There was no pregnancy,” Mrs. Biggs said. “The baby was one of her concocted ideas. There are things she can’t get out of her mind. After a while they seem true,” she said sadly. “Please explain to Mr. Baker. And thank him. He’s managed to be a knight in shining armour for my daughter once again.”

  “That’s his specialty,” Clare said, squeezing Mrs. Biggs’s small, cold hand.

  “The psychiatrist thinks that Jane should be hospitalized for her own protection.” A ray of sunlight shot through the glass on the front door, staining Mrs. Biggs’s hands red. “And,” she added, “to give me some rest.” The older woman looked thin and worn. “It’s only until she is back to herself,” she added to herself.

  45

  THE FOG WAS BURNING OFF, the harbour emerging piece by piece: the bristling buildings of Dartmouth, the piers lined with ships greedily taking on supplies, the Basilica on Barrington Street, and further out, Georges Island. If Clare looked more closely she could see unclaimed ruins still lying in places.

  Fred walked through the north of the city, where a new neighbourhood was rising from winter’s ashes, row houses built of cinder blocks on new wide streets. He turned towards the pier where the greasy smoke of a warship scored the sky.

  Clare had seen him walk by with his satchel from the studio window and she had quickly ducked out. She’d meant to call out to him. But something kept her silent, kept her following him at a block’s distance.

  He crossed the rail tracks and settled himself at the base of one of the piers, sitting on an old canvas cloth he spread on a wide brick wall.

  Other than the shouts of men loading the ships on the pier and the lazy late morning songs of sparrows, all was quiet. From a distance she watched him take out his pencils and sketchbook and begin, once again, to draw the harbour. There was no way for her to see what he was doing without giving herself away. Her heart was pounding as she walked towards him.

  He looked up at her in surprise. “Clare, I thought you were still at class.”

  “I left early.”

  He sat, with his pencil poised, looking at her quizzically.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  He laughed softly and held his pencil higher. “I’m drawing.”

  “I mean, what are you drawing?”

  He motioned for her to sit beside him. “The ships.”

  “Why?” she said.

  “Why not? Isn’t everything worth drawing?” He was looking at her intently.

  “Yes, of course.”

  He flipped back a few pages in his sketchbook. “I have an idea. Look,” he said. There were the ships, from many angles, in rich dazzle patterns. “How adaptable beauty is. I was thinking of inserting these dazzle patterns into my new window design.”

  Geraldine was right. These were strange times. Clare had been so easily moved to suspicion.

  A hot flush climbed up her neck and into her cheeks.

  “What did you think?” Fred asked gently.

  “There are people who think you are — you are not … on our side.”

  “Our side?”

  “Our country’s.”

  “This is my country, Clare.” He closed his sketchbook. “And you, are you one of those people?”

  “No.” She couldn’t look at him.

  WHILE THEY WERE TALKING, a figure who had been approaching them on the tracks drew close.

  “Well, Mr. Bacher. What are you up to on this fine day?”

  “Clare Holmes, you remember Ernie Ryan, one of the gaffers?” Fred said coldly.

  Ernie strode up to Fred and looked down at his sketches. “Now why would you be drawing warships?” he said.

  “They are interesting subjects with challenging perspective,” Fred said.

  “Interesting to who?” Ernie said.

  “Whom,” Clare said. Ernie ignored her. “The harbour is an exciting place, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Ryan?” she continued. “Mr. Lismer, the director of the School of Art and Design, has done a number of wonderful sketches and paintings here.”

  “I’m sure he has.” Ernie looked at her smugly. “I’ll leave you two alone to your artistic pursuits.” He tipped his hat and continued down the tracks, glancing back once over his shoulder.

  Fred began packing his things in his satchel. “I need to get to the studio,” he said, without looking at her.

  “I’ll come with you,” Clare said.

  They walked in silence. She could think of nothing to say to atone for her doubt.

  “Geraldine says that Celia is in love with you,” she finally said.

  “She’s just a girl,” Fred said.

  “She’s very mature for her age,” Clare said. “She’s been through a lot and has been very brave. She may prove to be as determined in love as she is in music.”

  A policeman walked towards them purposefully from the direction Ernie had headed.

  “Are you Freidrich Bacher?” the policeman said to Fred.

  “I was once,” Fred said.

  “And now?”

  “Fred Baker,” Fred said, holding out his hand.

  “And why would you change your name?” The policeman didn’t take his hand.

  Fred looked at him for a moment before saying, “It was easier.”

  “For what?”

  “For people to remember,” Fred said.

  “And easier if you needed to fit in, say you had something to hide,” the policeman said, a statement not a question. He was a short man, with a mouthful of overcrowded teeth. “Would you please tell me what you are doing down here?”

  “We’re art students. We were drawing,” Clare said.

  He looked at Clare’s eye patch suspiciously.

  “I asked Mr. Bacher,” the officer said.

  “She’s right,” Fred said.

  “May I see your drawings, please?” he said, addressing only Fred.

  Fred drew the sketchbook from his satchel and the policeman flipped through it. “Looks to me like you are recording activities on the waterfront which might be considered private concerns of our country’s war effort.”

  He took a pad and pen out of his jacket pocket. “Mr. Bacher, I am arresting you for suspicious behaviour. Best if you come quietly, without any fuss.”

  “This is silly,” Clare said. “Mr. Baker was drawing for pleasure. There is no ulterior motive whatsoever.”

  “And how do you know that exactly, young lady?” the policeman said.

  “I just do,” Clare answered. “Because we’re in art classes together. And because I draw here too.”

  “Was it your idea to come down here?”

  She hesitated for a moment. “Yes.”

  “She’s lying,” Fred said. “She followed me. It was my idea. But I am no spy.”

  THE POLICEMAN ALLOWED Clare to walk beside Fred but took up his position close behind them, as if they needed to be carefully supervised.

  “You can walk to the courthouse with him, but there will be no chatter,” he said.

  Clare took Fred’s moist hand.

  People
watched them pass, inspecting them closely, looking for clues as to why two perfectly respectable people might be being marched through town by a policeman. Ernie Ryan, leaning on a maple tree in the park opposite the courthouse, nodded at them and smirked.

  When they got to the door, the policemen slipped between Fred and Clare. She squeezed Fred’s hand.

  “No one beyond here unless on official business.” He smiled a grim smile at Clare without showing his crooked teeth.

  “I’ll be waiting to hear from you,” Clare said to Fred. He turned and looked at her over the shoulder of the policeman. “This is just ridiculous,” she called.

  46

  FRED WOULD RETURN to that moment over and over because he needed something to hold on to. Would search her face as she watched him leave, to find what he thought he saw there, a trace of yearning, etching of worry, for more than a friend. He would wonder, was it real? Or had he just imagined it?

  FRED AND ANOTHER PRISONER, an old German doctor who had fought in the Franco-Prussian war, were taken to Amherst in a military van. A young soldier rode with them in the back, his hand jumpy on his rifle. When they were allowed to stop to relieve themselves, the soldier stood near, eyes fixed on them, as if they might bolt like horses. The old doctor could hardly get out of the van with his bad knees. Fred gave him a hand back up.

  They smelled the sulphurous brine of salt marsh before they reached Amherst. The building was long and squat. The driver and young soldier walked in front of and behind the two prisoners to the office, a small room with low windows and a couple of heavy desks and chairs for the staff. The inside door still said Malleable Iron in black block letters. The prisoners stood while a man who looked like he was being strangled by his collar, his thick neck and face flushed deep pink, took their names and issued them one pair of pants and one shirt.

  “These are laundered once a week,” he said. “We keep the clothes you are wearing for the day you may be released. You can change behind the screen.” He pointed to the corner of the room where a peeling screen was propped. Fred felt the glass eye, still in his pocket. He’d been made to strip in the courthouse jail and place his possessions, the eye, his wallet, his sketchbook, and his pencils on a table. The police had kept the sketchbook, and examined his wallet for official identification, pulling out the card he had been issued by the registry of foreign citizens. To his relief they had shown little interest in the glass eye. He had explained that he worked at the glassworks and was studying the crafting of them. He had tried to convey that the glass eye was of no more value to him than a marble.

  He put on the grey canvas shirt and pants, and slipped the eye into a pocket.

  The old doctor was led, limping, out of the room by one of the soldiers. “Where are you taking me?” he said, looking back at Fred with bewilderment.

  “Presently we have seven hundred and ninety-one prisoners,” the red-faced soldier said to the old man. “Most of them are sailors. Bloody lucky to be here. You’ll be in the south end with the officers and professional civilians. My Bacher here,” he jerked his thumb at Fred, “stays.”

  Fred gripped the eye between his fingers. He was to be housed with the lower class of prisoners, then. In Germany a master artisan was the social equal of an officer. He had a feeling this was not a point to argue with the man.

  The quarters smelled of sweat and iron and the dust that sifted from the decaying foundry rafters. Bunks were in two tiers, three deep on either wall. Men elbowed past each other in the narrow aisles. Others lay on their bunks, their arms bent over their eyes. Some played cards. One young man sat on his bunk with his hands on his knees, rocking back and forth and staring at a spot on the floor.

  Fred was to sleep in the bunk above the boy. A man playing solitaire on the opposite bunk said in German, “Don’t worry, he’s harmless. He’s been like that for the last year.”

  A year!

  The man turned to the boy and spoke to him in Polish. He stopped rocking for a moment, then resumed.

  “I hope you’re good sleeper,” the man turned to Fred, speaking in German and shaking a card in the boy’s direction. “He does this all night.”

  The man held out his hand. “Nikola Boychuck. Petty officer, third class, SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse.”

  47

  LUCIEN INSISTED he accompany Leo to the field, which had turned golden in August’s heat. The old man pulled off a seed head. He opened it, releasing the grains from their dry sleeves, and examined them between his thumb and forefinger, rocking happily back and forth on his heels. Then he popped one grain in his mouth and bit down.

  “Ce sera prêt la semaine prochaine.” Next week they would begin the harvest.

  Once, during his first summer in France, Leo’s unit had marched past a ripe field. The captain had let the men rest for ten minutes and they all immediately fell out of line and into disarray, reclining along the roadside. He sat with his arms propped on his folded knees, watching the hot wind ripple through the wheat in waves. It could have been a day a hundred years before, a summer of peace. Leo had had a swift comprehension of the recklessness of war and how irrevocably he was caught in its machinery.

  NATALIE HAD BEEN TO the village that morning. Rather than going straight home with her small ration of tea and sugar, she had continued on to the field where Leo and Lucien stood. Her head was bowed with the effort of peddling up the little hill. She was already talking before she came to a full stop. “The British tanks have broken through the trenches at Amiens and are pushing the Germans back.”

  In the last weeks Allied trucks and tanks had been moving on the farm roads. When Leo saw their dust rising in the distance, he went to the barn. He milked the cow and then walked to the pen where her calf stood crying. She would be raised like her mother, for milk. She was three months old. Her spindly legs had grown sturdy and her black-and-white coat was thickening. Leo crouched and stroked behind her ears, leaning close. He walked her to her mother to suckle. He had never milked cows or raised calves. His father grew hay and apples. Milk at home was delivered in bottles once a week.

  In these moments, in the weak light of the barn, inhaling the grassy breath of the animals, the white hum in his ears fell quiet, and the pressure in his chest eased. Sometimes Natalie would come to find him there and they would lie together in the fragrant hayloft, where she had first found him. Afterward he would chastise her again for shooting him and she would laugh, “I don’t regret it at all. Otherwise you would not have stayed.”

  “You could have just asked,” Leo would say.

  One evening she propped herself up on one elbow and leaned over his chest, knitting her dark eyebrows together. “Leo, don’t leave, ever.”

  And he stroked her hair and lay her head back down on his shoulder.

  Each day there was news of the Allies’ continued advance. And with each sign that the war was grinding to a close, Leo drew farther and farther away from a decision. He could not imagine any simple way back into his past.

  Sometimes, when Natalie was straddling him, her dark hair falling over his face, he thought of Clare. He hoped that if she’d grieved him, her sorrow had passed. Yet, when he thought of her finding someone else, he had an irrational pique of jealousy.

  In late August, Leo helped Hugo harvest his wheat. Leo’s French had improved and the initial silences which had marked their friendship had been replaced by the small talk of farmers: how much wheat they would grind verses store, where was the best place to sell it, should Hugo clear more field and grow barley next summer? One day as the two of them sat on the side of the field eating the lunch Claudette had packed for them, a wedge of bread, a thick slice of cheese, and small tart early apples, Hugo turned to him. “Your leg has healed well.”

  “Yes. If Natalie hadn’t shot me in first place I would say it’s thanks to her.”

  Hugo laughed a low grunt and bit into his bread and cheese. He chewed, took a drink of water, and passed the stoneware jar to Leo. “What will you do?”<
br />
  Leo looked away, out over the half-cut wheat.

  Hugo said, “The war was supposed to be one year long. In the spring after Verdun, where Armand was shot, the French were slaughtered first in Champagne and then the Somme. It is not spoken of much but there were mutinies, many men shot for treason. In my opinion,” he mopped his brown neck with a cloth he drew from his shirt pocket, “sometimes a man has seen too much and cannot fight anymore. It is no crime.”

  Leo looked into the water in the jar he was holding, which was trembling in his hands. He put it down carefully.

  THE FIRST RAINS came early in October. Natalie began going into the village whenever she could to hear the latest news, which came through the static of a radio in the post office.

  Some days, she’d go to the hospital in the old almshouse and help the nurses with their patients, who were swelling the wards as the offensive intensified. She took a special interest in the Canadians, sitting by their beds to talk to them, asking where they came from, what they did before the war. Maybe she would learn something to tell Leo. Often she caught herself thinking of him as Armand, sometimes she even called him that by mistake. He would turn to answer her question, without surprise.

  Some of the men had been admitted lately without injuries, but with high fevers and chest infections.

  “Give them plenty to drink and swab them with cool cloths until their fevers drop,” the nurses said. Compared to the men with gangrenous limbs or with faces full of shrapnel, these patients were easy. They were weakened by years in the trenches but they were young.

  One morning, just after she arrived at the hospital, a Red Cross nurse, a strong ox of a woman from a good Paris family, called her to the nursing office.

  “Captain Evans died this afternoon,” she said.

  “What? He was improving yesterday.”

  “He worsened last night and died early this morning.”

  Tears formed in Natalie’s eyes. He was the first soldier Natalie had nursed from critical to almost well, a handsome young man, with white teeth and warm brown eyes. He had shown Natalie the picture of his fiancée, a pretty girl, perched daintily on a wrought iron bench in a sunny garden. He was a schoolteacher, from Nova Scotia. He could have been Leo.