by Fiona Valpy
She was startled, suddenly, by the sight of a figure standing stock-still among the trees. It was Yves, who must have remained behind when his brothers-in-arms had slipped away from the graveside. He stepped forward and put an arm around her. Burying her face against his shoulder, she sobbed.
He stood there silently, letting her cry. And then, when her sobs began to slow and quieten, he pushed back a strand of her hair from her tear-soaked face. ‘Eliane,’ he said. ‘Listen to me. You think you have lost both the men you love. But you haven’t. Mathieu is still there. And when this war is over, you will know that you never really lost him. That he was always there.’
She pulled back, looking into Yves’ face. ‘What do you mean? How could I ever love Mathieu again? He’s on the other side now. He was working against Jacques. He’s working against you.’
Yves shook his head. ‘He’s not, Eliane. That’s all I can tell you. But you have to believe me: he’s not.’
He hugged her again and then slipped away into the trees without a backwards glance.
As she turned away from the grave and walked slowly back down the hill, her tears fell like raindrops on to the dry meadow grasses, which bowed their heads and sighed in the chill November wind.
Abi: 2017
On my next day off, Sara gives me the directions and I climb up through the fields above Coulliac to where the tree line begins. It takes a little bit of finding, but eventually I spot it: an oak tree with the Cross of Lorraine carved into the trunk.
I know that Jack’s body no longer lies here. At the end of the war, his parents were notified of his death and of the location of his makeshift grave, and so they were able to bring their son home, to lie in the local churchyard close to his family home. But I sense that a part of him will always be here, in the hills above Coulliac, watching over the land he helped to liberate.
As I stand gazing out across the valley, I can’t help comparing Jack Connelly’s funeral with the service that was held in the grand London church for Zac. I sat in the front pew beside his mother, though I could feel the waves of loathing coming off her as she angled her body slightly away from me, keeping her eyes focused on the coffin. She’d arranged it all, from the venue and the guest list to the bouquet of lilies on the fine-grained lid of the beechwood coffin. I could only imagine how desperate it must have felt for her, to have lost her beloved only son. And worse, for him to have been survived by the silly young wife whom she so hated. I could hear her thinking it, as the vicar began the service: Why is she still here when he is gone? Why couldn’t it have been Abi who died in the accident, not my Zac?
And I could feel my own guilt radiating in waves through the fabric of my black coat. It’d been weeks since the accident – long enough for my swollen, blackened knee to have begun to heal and for the bones of my arm to begin to knit themselves back together. It had taken that long for the police to complete the enquiry into the circumstances of the accident, to conduct their interviews with me and the other witnesses, and for the autopsy report to be issued. Loss of control while driving under the influence of excessive alcohol in the bloodstream – that was the official verdict.
Even though I’d told the police how I’d grabbed the wheel. Even though I knew I’d killed him as he’d tried to kill me.
The service was bad enough, although at least in the church Zac’s mother had managed to keep up some semblance of civility towards me, even if only for appearances’ sake. But after the service, in private at the crematorium, she made no pretence at all. After the coffin had glided silently away as the curtains had fallen back into place, she turned towards me as we sat on the stiffly upholstered chairs. Instinctively, I’d reached out a hand to her, hoping, I suppose, for some small gesture of reconciliation or mutual support at the very end. But she’d just looked at me with utter hatred, her eyes hard and cold, and she’d recoiled from my touch. I’d let my hand fall to my side and she’d walked off, leaving one of the funeral director’s men to help me to my feet and hand me the crutch that helped to take the weight off my knee when I walked. He’d been kind, a fatherly-looking man, and had driven me back to the apartment. As he’d helped me from the back of the black saloon car and seen me safely into the building, he’d patted my hand where it protruded from the cast on my arm. ‘Don’t worry about her, love. Grief does strange things. I’ve seen enough funerals to know they either bring out the very best or the worst in people. Everyone needs space and time to grieve.’
That was the only moment, on the day of Zac’s funeral, that tears came into my eyes. A few words of kindness offered by a stranger were the only comfort I received that day.
The accident. I haven’t thought about it for a long time. ‘Accident’ is a useful word, but I still wonder just how accurately it describes what happened. Because, in a way, it was inevitable. Not some haphazard fluke of fate but rather an unavoidable conclusion to the path we’d been set on ever since that day he first saw me, and targeted me as his prey.
We were in his car, driving back from Sunday lunch at his mother’s. He’d had a few glasses of wine, as usual, despite my anxious glances and my tentative suggestion that maybe the glass of port at the end of the meal was a drink too many.
‘Nonsense, Abigail, Zac knows his limits. I always think a nagging wife is one of the most unattractive things there is,’ his mother had retorted, pouring him a glass from the crystal decanter that sat on the polished sideboard in the dining room.
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like me to drive?’ I’d asked him as we walked to the car. He’d taunted me then, leering at me, dangling the keys in front of my face and pretending to stagger drunkenly down the path.
‘Come on, Zac, please. Let me drive,’ I’d said more forcefully.
A mistake.
His expression immediately grew cold, his eyes frosting over with anger. Most people describe anger as hot and fiery, but Zac’s was always as cold as ice.
‘Get in,’ he snapped. ‘Or would you rather walk home?’
I should have refused to get in.
I should have walked.
I shouldn’t have gone home.
I should have left him, then and there.
In the car, he was silent. I tried to make things better, to soothe his anger by talking about inconsequential things: how nice the lunch had been (it hadn’t, though – it had been the usual grey, tasteless cut of meat served with overcooked vegetables); how well his mother was looking now she’d got over that nasty cold she’d had; how the weather seemed to be brightening up for the week ahead.
He hadn’t replied. He’d just pulled away from the kerb and driven, too fast, through the village, the speed-limit signs lighting up in warning as the car approached and then flashed past them. I’d pulled out my phone, to check the weather forecast and see whether the week ahead was indeed going to be warm and sunny. I’d had the phone turned off during lunch – a formality, really, as I never expected anyone other than Zac to phone me or text me on it. As I switched it back on, it beeped. I glanced at the screen and then swiped the message out of the way.
‘Aren’t you going to tell me who it’s from then?’ Zac had said, his tone dripping acid.
‘It’s a message from one of the people in my tutorial group. She’s just saying they haven’t seen me for a while and wondering if I’m okay.’
‘Let me see,’ he said, taking his left hand off the steering wheel. The car, which was travelling far too fast now on the twisting country road, swerved a little and an oncoming motorcyclist flashed his lights and gesticulated angrily.
‘Zac, no, be careful.’
‘Give me the phone, Abi,’ he said, his tone unnaturally calm. In that moment, his voice sounded almost reasonable.
‘Here, look,’ I turned the phone so that he could see the message.
‘Sam?’ he said. ‘Who the hell is Sam?’ A muscle flickered in his jaw.
‘Sam is a girl. Just a girl in my tutor group. I told you.’
‘Give me t
he phone, Abi.’
‘When we get home, I will. You can look at it then and you’ll see. There are no other messages. It’s just that I missed the last two meetings and caught up online.’
And then he lost it. ‘I said, give me the fucking phone!’ He screamed the words and I flinched as if they were blows raining down on my head and arms.
I realised, then, that he was steering straight towards one of the trees growing on the raised verge along the side of the road. Terrified, I reached across with my right hand to grab the wheel, to try to put the car back on course, and he brought the edge of his left hand down hard on my forearm, with such force that I felt the bones snap. I screamed in pain and terror, my hand dangling at an agonising, useless angle. We’d avoided the tree, but the car lurched and swerved again and the engine roared as he stood hard on the accelerator, deliberately steering towards the next one.
In that moment, I realised that he was trying to kill me. Perhaps to kill himself while he was at it, too, but he was going to crush the passenger’s side of the car against the tree at full speed, obliterating me.
Where did it come from, that surge of strength through my body? I know, now, that the terror and the pain must have made adrenaline shoot through my veins and that my next movement was reflexive. But I think it was something more than that, too. It was anger at the damage he’d done to me, it was the spark of my Self, suddenly reawakening; it was the resilience of the human spirit. It was resistance.
Because he had the accelerator forced to the floor, my seatbelt didn’t restrain me as I twisted round and reached across with my good, left arm. I grabbed the wheel and forced it to turn, resisting his strength, finding my own power at last. I felt the car rise up as it hit the grass verge, missing the solid grey trunk of the tree by a few millimetres, and then it flipped, an almost graceful arc of car-shaped metal flying through the air into the path of the oncoming lorry.
Braced for the impact, I felt my knee twist with a searing pain that brought a red mist down over my eyes and made my stomach heave.
And then I felt nothing. Just a strange, unearthly calm as the car imploded around the two of us. Zac and me.
And when everything finally stopped, I looked over at him. His eyes were wide, surprised, as cold and blue as ice. He opened his mouth, as if to say something, and then his eyes rolled back in his head and the waxy tinge of death suffused his face.
I remember very clearly what I felt in that moment. Relief. Nothing else. Before the pain made me pass out.
Later, when I came to and I saw Zac’s face as they cut his body out of the car, I still felt very little. I was deep in shock, of course; but even so I can remember how it was to see his familiar features in his bloodless face and have the sense that this wasn’t him.
His body was a lot less cut up than mine was. He had suffered massive internal injuries where the steering wheel crushed his ribcage, splintering the bones and driving them into his heart and lungs.
My injuries were more visible, but not fatal: lacerations to my arms, the lower part of the right one hanging at a useless angle where the bones had been sheared through; a dislocated knee and more lacerations to my thighs. All outwardly mendable, given time. It was the trauma that went so much deeper, though; that crippled me more than my damaged limbs.
But even through the shock and the chaos, and despite the fact that the paramedics were trying to shield me from the sight of him, I can still remember it clearly. His frozen, waxen features; and my sense of stunned relief.
‘Little Abi, how perfect you are . . .’ I can hear his words now, the words he spoke at the end of our first date, as if they were blown on the wind that stirs the meadow grasses at my feet. And I know, now, exactly what those words meant. To him, I was blank piece of paper on which he could write what he wanted. I was already isolated – it would be easy to control me. I was desperate for affection, but I didn’t know what real love was. My mother’s love for me had dissolved long ago in a sea of cheap vodka and since then I’d made do with the love offered up by the children I’d cared for, knowing that they would grow up and I would be forgotten as I moved on to another family. What a little mouse I was, naïve enough to be flattered, to mistake the attention he bestowed on me for love. I wanted it to be, and so I made myself believe that it was something it wasn’t.
With my fingertips, I trace the lines of the cross scored into the oak tree once more. Almost seventy-five years on, the long, vertical cut with its two cross bars has widened as the tree has grown. But, at the same time, the oak has managed to heal the scar, sealing closed the wound.
I run my hands over the sleeves of my shirt, feeling the faint ridges beneath the thin cotton and I marvel at the way my body has healed itself, just as the tree has done.
The cross is just as much a part of the oak as its branches and its roots, just as my scars are now a part of me, for ever more. And yet, there is resilience. The body finds a way to close the wounds, to live with the scars. To heal.
And, yes, even to grow.
Eliane: 1944
The winter had seemed interminably long. Eliane’s heart was frozen with grief and loss, which even the first warm day of spring couldn’t thaw. Despite what Yves had said, she felt she’d lost both of the men she’d loved. And the war dragged on, sapping France, bleeding the country dry. The tide had turned against the German army now – that much was evident from the preoccupied air and low spirits of the soldiers occupying the château as they passed more long months away from their homes and families in a strange, starved land where they were hated and feared. Official reports in the newspapers were heavily censored, glossing over the setbacks for the occupying army. But Monsieur le Comte would come into the kitchen on the winter evenings to sit by the warmth of the range and sip his night-time tisane, and he would whisper news to Eliane and Madame Boin of the growing groundswell of action, of Allied air-raids, of Soviet victories and of German defeats. As spring arrived and his reports told of a definite, sustained shift in the momentum of the war against Hitler’s Wehrmacht, a few fragile shoots of hope began to stir in their hearts.
One morning towards the end of May, Eliane and Madame Boin were in the kitchen preparing the first of the early cherries, which Eliane had picked from a tree that was tucked into a corner behind the barn, where it caught the sun and was protected from the frost and wind so always bore its fruit before any of the other trees. The tips of her fingers were stained pink by the tangy juice as she cut the stones out of the fruit.
As Oberleutnant Farber and the general entered the kitchen, the women set down their knives and wiped their hands on damp cloths, turning to face the soldiers respectfully. Visits to the kitchen by the general were rare – more often it was Oberleutnant Farber alone who came to relay any official orders, or Monsieur le Comte who occasionally passed on requests from the Germans for a particular dish to be served at dinner that night.
The oberleutnant translated as the general spoke. ‘Ladies, our units have been ordered to move north. We thank you for your work to make our stay at Château Bellevue as pleasant as possible for all concerned. However, the château will not be empty for long. We leave tomorrow and you will have approximately two days to prepare for your next visitors. Another unit will be coming through the region on its way north also. The château will be used by them as a base for a few days – perhaps longer – until they receive further orders. The situation is a little uncertain right now. Oberleutnant Farber will be staying on here as a liaison officer to assist the new unit, as he knows the ropes. So it is auf wiedersehen from the rest of us for now. But, who knows, perhaps we’ll be back before too long if the rumours of an invasion attempt turn out to be yet another false alarm.’
With a click of his boot heels he turned and left, the oberleutnant following in his wake.
The next twenty-four hours were a flurry of noise and activity as the soldiers packed up and prepared for deployment. A couple of hours after the last of them had gone, setting off
to the station with a final revving of truck engines, Eliane paused at her tasks with the beehives, raising her head as she heard the distant rhythmic beat of a train. This one, she assumed, would be filled with soldiers instead of civilian deportees. But perhaps it was carrying those soldiers to another place of horror and death. She sensed that the paths of the war were converging as it reached a climactic turning point. Would it be an ending, or just the beginning of something even worse for France?
As the sound of the train faded into the distance, she closed up the hive she’d been working on, picked up her pails of honey frames and carried them back to the château.
The new ‘guests’ at Château Bellevue were quite different to the soldiers who’d occupied the château for the past four years. The soldiers of the Panzer regiment, who arrived just as Eliane and Madame Boin were remaking the last few beds, were battle hardened from their previous experience of fighting on the Russian front, with eyes that were deadened by the things that they’d seen and souls that were numbed by the things that they’d done. Their tanks rumbled up the track to Château Bellevue, crushing stones and pulverising pebbles into a cloud of thick dust that hung in the air long after the throbbing roar of the engines had ceased.
Eliane hurried about her duties with her head lowered and her eyes downcast. In their black and silver uniforms, these soldiers brought with them a new darkness and she had to swallow the sour taste of fear that rose in her throat whenever she encountered one of them.
When not helping Madame Boin, she spent as much time as possible in the garden, watering the new season’s crops, pruning dead branches that had been touched by last winter’s frosted fingers, and hoeing the weeds from the beds of the potager. She immersed herself in her work, thankful that it distracted her from the heaviness of her heart. She still grieved for Jack, and often walked up through the fields to the young oak tree on the edge of the copse to visit his grave. The grass was well established again there now and wildflowers made a coverlet for his body. Throughout the winter months, the slender branches of the oak tree had been lifeless-looking twigs, with a few dry, crumpled brown leaves clinging on here and there despite the winter storms; but then, early one spring morning, she’d noticed the first of the new growth beginning to open at the end of each twig, tentatively unfurling into tender flourishes of green. That day, she’d turned her face towards the rising sun and gazed eastwards in the direction of Tulle. She wondered what Mathieu was doing at that moment. Does he ever think of me? How is he managing to survive the despair and deprivation that this war has brought upon us? In some ways, she thought, it was easier to grieve for the loss of Jack than for the loss of Mathieu. Death brought a sense of conclusion that abandonment did not. Her heart still longed for Mathieu – Yves’ words at the graveside had lodged themselves in her head, a flicker of hope like a candle flame in the darkness – even though she still tried to tell herself firmly that she had to accept that he’d made his choice and gone. And even if Yves was right and Mathieu did deserve forgiveness, so much time had passed now – and so much had happened – that neither of them could be the same carefree young people that they had been before war broke out.
