by Caroline Lea
BY Easter of 1941, Dr Carter no longer needed Edith at the hospital. He was rarely there himself and, if the rumours were true, he was spending all of his time caring for the Commandant. She didn’t ask him about it. Some things are best left unsaid.
Instead Edith made it her business to nurse Marthe. Rationing meant little enough meat for each of them, but Edith happily scooped most of hers onto Marthe’s plate and she paid trips to the butcher whenever the whisper was that there was a bit extra over from France.
Clement Hacquoil was back behind his counter. After all those months in hospital, he was nothing but skin and bone. He put Edith in mind of a puppet, moving in short, tortured bursts and then collapsing. His wife was lurking in the background, of course, pulling the strings, stitched little lips sewn up into a scowl as she watched him.
Plenty of folk didn’t recognise Clement. He was a shrunken shadow of the big, bluff man he had been. And then there was his skin—his face and arms were still pink and raw, even though he was healed and hardened. The melted skin had stretched his lips back from his teeth in a vicious leer, even when his eyes were smiling.
When he spoke, his voice was a wet rasp, and he had to pause every so often to suck the saliva back into his mouth or dab at his chin with a handkerchief. If children cringed, he’d put out his tongue (which looked quite normal), or magic a tiny scrap of cooked pork skin from thin air, for a baby to chew on. People would laugh and that jittery feeling in the room would fade, for the most part.
In fact, if anything, business was better than ever for the Hacquoils. Some went to gape, but many went to show their support—solidarity for the poor man whose world had been exploded forever by those bombs.
When first he was out of hospital, Clement greeted Edith like she was his own mother, giving her special cuts of meat he’d put aside. That broken leer, that squelching lisp as he proclaimed, ‘This is the woman who saved my life. Worked miracles with her own hands, she did.’
Joan, eyes on her like little flints, would tut or glare. ‘None of your blasphemy in here, Clement. The Lord alone saves. Look, there’s a queue of customers waiting while you stand gassing.’
She was jealous of the attention, perhaps, or feared that Edith’s influence might grow greater than her own.
Before long, Edith noticed Joan shouldering Clement aside so that she could serve her. He soon stopped standing up when Edith came in, stopped trying to stretch those ruined lips into a smile. He would nod a greeting to Edith and pass the time of day, but his eyes slid from hers. The parcels of meat that Joan gave Edith were smaller; the extras stopped. Soon, the packages were nothing more than fat and bloodied gristle.
Edith wouldn’t have been so particular if it had just been for herself—years of making do meant she could rustle soup from anything and be glad of it. But it pained her to think of Marthe going without, especially since she knew that eating meat might be a way of easing the slow drag of the sickness that was unravelling her. So where before Edith would have nodded and hurried off with her miserly brown parcel of scraps, now she squared her jaw and glared. She started opening that little packet up, right in front of the other customers, presenting the bits of meat for all to see, as close to the window as she could.
‘Ooh, but this is a bit ripe, don’t you think? Maybe you haven’t quite the same sense of smell, Clement, after those nasty burns. But honestly, put your nose into that. This chicken stinks like it’s been roosting in a midden. Have a sniff, will you, Joan?’
The other customers crowded in, muttering at the smell and the look of the bird she held up: greenish in places and reeking like mouldering cheese.
Joan glowered and growled something at Clement, who muttered, Sorry, sorry, and limped off to find Edith another chicken. Shamefaced, he thrust it at her, whispering more apologies and rubbing at those shiny scars of his.
It was that way for weeks when Edith went in: a cut of pork still with mud-clogged hair bristling the skin; a rabbit that looked more like a cat to Edith’s eye—it had staved-in ribs and long ropes of intestines spilling out, as though it had been squashed by a motor car.
It was on that day that Edith asked Joan if she meant to give her cat-guts for one of her potions: ‘They’re very useful for calling up familiars, or so I hear.’
Joan’s cheeks flushed and she shot a scalpel-sharp look at Clement. He cringed and shifted painfully out of her way as she disappeared out the back.
Clement coughed. ‘Now, Edith, I’m ever so grateful to you. What you did for me—’
She kept her voice flat. ‘Saved your life, you mean?’
‘Yes, that…’
‘No trouble, Clement. I wouldn’t think to let a friend suffer.’
‘Yes, I know you mean no harm, but Joan feels… That is, we think…’
He was twisting a pork loin in those big shiny claws. Normally, he was gentle with the meat, even with the awkwardness of moving his ruined hands.
Edith softened her tone. ‘What are you trying to tell me, Clement, my love? I have to stop my provoking of your wife? Is that it?’
He drew a breath, closed his eyes. ‘I’m obliged, you understand, for all you did for me, with the… But—’ He winced and rubbed at his scars, and then it all tumbled out in a babble. ‘You can’t be coming here anymore to shop. It’s not good for business. Having you and your sort about.’
Edith raised her eyebrows and let the silence stretch between them.
Clement opened his eyes and went back to twisting those ripped-up pieces of pork. Over his shoulder, Edith could see a shadow lurking behind the little piece of fabric that marked off where the shop ended and their home began.
Finally Edith said, nice and loud, so she knew Joan couldn’t fail to hear, ‘That’s a shame, Clement. It’s been such a convenience for both of us. Me shopping here, I mean. It really has. In the past, I’ve had some lovely meat from you. You’d have hardly known there was a war on. It’s been handy for you too, hasn’t it, me coming by? I do like to help people when I can. Even Joan, bless her. It’s been hard on her too, with your injuries, I’ve heard…’
She watched Clement carefully. Face, eyes, mouth: all suddenly frozen. The shadow behind the curtain was still.
Edith affected a jovial air, as if she were asking about the meat delivery.
‘Yes, Vibert was saying it’s a terrible shame for a man to be locked out of his own bedroom of a night, and no matter how his scars might look. I can understand why you’d feel sour about it.’
Clement’s expression was one of panic.
‘If you like,’ Edith whispered, loudly, ‘I can mix a tonic to relax her. Perhaps she’ll be less snappish if she at least lets you—’
Clement shoved a big package of meat at her. ‘Here’s a decent piece of pork for you, then. If you come back tomorrow, I might have a chicken. There are some due from France. I can put one by for you. No charge, of course.’
Edith tried not to smile too widely. ‘Oh, bless you. Generous to a fault you are, Clement, my love. I’ll be seeing you tomorrow.’
Joan’s expression as Edith turned to leave was a treat. She’d poked that scrawny neck of hers around the curtain, practically spitting with rage.
Edith whooped as she stepped from the shop. It put her in a dancing mood, the laughter: a sort of fizz in her stomach. She skipped down the street, grinning from ear to ear. She could see folks covering their mouths, but they could sneer away because good meat would make Marthe better. And if that wasn’t cause for a bit of skipping, even at Edith’s age, then nothing was.
As she skipped, Edith imagined what Joan must be saying to Clement at that very moment, and that set off the giggles. In the end she had to lean against a wall because she had no puff left in her; just wave after wave of laughter.
Marthe was asleep when she arrived back home. Edith gave the neighbour’s boy half a penny for watching the girl. He scampered off before she could notice that he’d been picking at the corners of her cabbage loaf again. Not
that she minded. He was a skinny little runt with enormous eyes.
Edith had become used to the squeeze and grumble of her hollow belly, the feeling of being scrubbed out inside with wire wool and disinfectant. She could ignore the pinching gripe that twisted her guts most mornings. Coming over dizzy and lightheaded was trickier to master. She’d taken to chewing on raw bulbs of wild garlic, which chased off the fug of exhaustion, though she didn’t much care for the way it made her breath and clothes smell.
It was all worth it, though, to see Marthe thriving. The girl was sleeping better and was undoubtedly less twitchy—she hadn’t scratched the skin off her face with her nails for weeks.
Edith kept waiting for Maurice to comment, but he didn’t say a word. And, if Edith was to tell the truth, she didn’t think he’d noticed. Not that he didn’t love Marthe: he worshipped the very bones of her: it was plain as a wash of sudden sunlight on his face when he looked at her, or in the softness in his voice when he spoke to her.
The sea tugged at his thoughts constantly. Longing was in the shadows of his eyes: the constant need to provide, to do something. Perhaps it was men and war—a curious sort of feebleness for them, squeezed within the enemy’s iron fist. So Maurice filled his time with doing things. Clutching at power wherever he could find it. Always off, out to catch a fish or find the best trade for warm clothes or more bread. Or off to meet those French fishermen and garner news that the wireless wouldn’t tell him. And, for all he said he was simply looking out for Marthe and that he didn’t really want to leave the house, Edith saw that little spring in his step when he walked out the door to go off to his boat—the same lightness had surged through her after that little run-in with Clement and Joan.
Her Frank had worn that same look before he went off to fight. He’d stroked her cheek and said he was doing it for her, so she’d be proud of him. But he had been deaf to her protests, her pleas, her tears. She wouldn’t be proud, she’d said. She didn’t want him to go. Didn’t want him to fight.
He’d claimed not to believe a word of it. He was off to prove himself to her. But Edith had known, even then, as a young woman not long out of her father’s house, Frank’s reason for going was nothing to do with her. It was all about him. Chasing some little fragment of himself he thought was missing; the war offered him the chance to become someone else.
Edith had seen the way he’d smiled at the mirror once he had that uniform on. He had looked himself in the eyes and grinned like a doe-eyed, lovesick fool. That’s war, Edith thought. Men trying to find themselves, searching out some misplaced strength, and they only found it in the mirror once they were dressed in their uniform with a gun.
Edith hoped Frank had found that splinter of himself he had been on the lookout for. She hoped he saw his reflection in some blood-black trench puddle and it made him smile. She hoped he was happy with himself and what he was worth before that bomb came and blew him all to bits.
The nights after they handed her the letter were the worst: she would lie awake for hours, burning up with the wanting of him, skin aflame with the need for something. The heat of a body. The chance for a life to blossom within her belly again. In those first years, she’d thought that if he walked in the door smiling and said that they’d made a mistake, it hadn’t been him that was killed at all… Well, she thought she’d kill him there and then herself for all that he’d put her through.
Time ticked on and she grew to think that if he walked through her door, after all those aching, empty years and everything that had happened, she wouldn’t dream of murder. She’d sit him down and make him a nice cup of tea, and press a kiss into his stubbled cheek. Then she’d sit and tell him how he’d scooped the life from her when he disappeared. Left her hollow and full of echoes. And then she might tread on his toes by accident. Or tip scalding tea into his lap by mistake.
But no more talk of killing. There was too much death and hatred already, Edith thought sadly, without her hurling more fuel on to the blaze.
BY the time the Germans had been on the island a year, Claudine’s home was quiet and dark and cold and hungry. Maman stayed in her nightgown much of the time, often growling at Claudine for being bad—talking too loudly, or burning the potatoes, or accidentally letting the door slam and rousing Maman from her grey fog.
‘You selfish child,’ she snarled. ‘You can see I’m sleeping.’
Claudine smothered her sobs and tried to be good but sometimes it was hard to know what good was. Good was quiet, she knew that, so she thought of rabbits—how they made themselves small and still and silent.
When she could, Claudine spent time with Maurice. He showed her how to braid broken fishing rope and debone a fish, even before it was cooked. Sometimes, when she sat next to him, watching the shimmering fish scales peel away like scattered sunlight under his knife, she could imagine he was Papa.
When Maurice first started going to Edith’s house, Claudine thought she should stop seeing him, because Edith was a horrid old woman and Maman would be angry if she knew Claudine was there. But then she started to wonder if perhaps Maman’s black moods made monsters from thin air.
Last year, Claudine had watched Maman scream at Edith and bundle her from the house and slam the door. Maman had called Edith ‘that interfering old witch’ and Claudine had nodded because grown-ups knew best. But then Claudine remembered more and more the way Maman had shouted at Francis and drawn her hand back to strike him, simply for crying. And Claudine recalled how soft and warm Edith had always been, the gentle lull of her voice, the rumble of laughter in her chest when Claudine squeezed her in a tight embrace, the smile that tugged her mouth upwards whenever she looked at the children. Once the black cloud in Maman’s head lifted, Claudine hoped she might understand why she was seeing Edith again. Until then, she crept from the house and didn’t mention Edith’s name.
Claudine liked helping to care for Marthe. She wasn’t frightening, not really. She reminded Claudine of a newborn calf, with her big liquid eyes and the way she trembled and moaned, as if life itself was a terror. Claudine kissed her cheeks and brushed her hair and told her stories. They liked Little Red Riding Hood best. Maurice and Edith listened too. Claudine was a good girl, they said to each other, smiling.
Maurice was late back from fishing one day. Edith was humming under her breath, but worry scrabbled in Claudine’s gut just the same—she could see the fear in the deep creases around Edith’s eyes and her mouth.
When Maurice finally returned, it was nearly dark.
‘Where on earth have you been?’ Edith snapped. ‘We were worried sick. Imagining all sorts.’
He was soaking, his hair plastered to his head. His skin was the greyish-blue of a drowned man.
He collapsed in a chair and covered his face with his hands. ‘Two soldiers stranded today,’ he mumbled. ‘Went out looking for limpets—fools were cut off by the tide.’
Edith gaped. ‘What happened?’
‘They were seen, of course. Germans took a boat out to pick them up. I had to hide in a cove until the boat was gone. Sorry to have worried you.’
‘No bother, you’re safe. That’s what matters.’
His eyes were weary. ‘I watched them for almost an hour, sitting on that rock. The water was creeping higher—they were panicking. Couldn’t swim a stroke, I shouldn’t wonder.’ He gave a thin smile. ‘I was hoping they’d drown.’
Claudine frowned. ‘Didn’t you want to rescue them?’ It was confusing to her, the sort of anger that would let a good man like Maurice watch two terrified men drown.
His thin smile grew. ‘Not a bit of it. If every single one of the soldiers on this island drowned, all twelve thousand of them, I’d be happy.’
‘What about the good ones?’
‘There aren’t any good ones.’
‘But you don’t know any of them.’
‘No, I don’t. And I’ve no wish to. And you’d be best to keep away from them too. Wouldn’t trust them an inch.’
Cla
udine flushed. He must know she was still spending time with Gregor. She felt a flash of alarm—what if Edith knew too? What if she thought Claudine was bad and foolish?
But then she felt a miserable sort of rage: everybody was angry with her for being friends with a soldier; they all thought her dim-witted and a silly little girl, but none of them knew Gregor. Why couldn’t they understand, or at least try? Frustration made her voice shrill.
‘But they’re kind, some of them. They’re real people. Just like us.’
Maurice laughed. Cold, hard sound, like a stone thudding against a brick wall.
‘Bless you, but you’re a simpleton, Claudine. They are nothing like us. I’m sure of it. How many countries have we invaded, eh? How many people have you killed today, child?’
He wasn’t being fair but she couldn’t find the words to explain it, not when he didn’t want to understand.
‘Not all of them are like that! Some of them are kind.’
‘I suppose this is about that soldier of yours, eh?’ he said, angrily. ‘The one you’ve made friends with?’
Claudine glanced at Edith’s shocked face, hoping to see a glimmer of sympathy, but Edith was silent.
‘You’re a hare-brained child,’ Maurice said, ‘and you’ll end up hurt. If I were your papa, I wouldn’t be letting you out of the house.’
‘But you’re not,’ she snapped. ‘My papa is fighting and you’re not. So you can’t tell me what to do!’
Edith gasped. ‘Enough, both of you! What’s all this about a soldier, Claudine?’
Claudine hesitated. Edith would understand, surely?
‘His name is Gregor and he is good, truly, he is.’
‘But…a German soldier? Maurice is right, my love, it’s foolishness to mix with them.’
‘He’s not just a soldier. He’s my friend.’ She knew her voice sounded wheedling but she couldn’t help it.
Edith sat next to her and took her hand. The older woman’s fingers were rough but her tone was gentle.
