by Lily Graham
‘Wine, please.’
Madame Joubert poured her a glass, and came to take a seat next to her.
‘May I?’ she said, indicating the book.
Valerie nodded, watching as she opened the leather-bound book, her fingers pausing as she touched the pages. A hand fluttered to her heart. ‘It’s about you,’ she breathed.
Valerie nodded. Tears pricked her eyes as she cleared her throat, trying to clear the sudden swell of emotion too.
‘I just – wanted to show someone, someone who would understand.’
Madame Joubert nodded. She flipped through the pages, and Valerie looked on as she did. She hadn’t been able to keep going by herself. She caught her breath as she saw another person’s handwriting, messier, a man’s, she guessed, and she realised with a jolt that it must have been her father’s.
‘It’s like a small journal,’ she breathed. With tiny entries and snapshots into their lives. Written when Mireille, no doubt, never imagined that one day it would be found like this.
Together they read a passage that brought instant tears to both their eyes.
There are five cries that I have identified so far. The midwife, Lisette, said that one day I would know them all. But there is one that is just for me, for her mother. It is when I leave the room, and it is the one that breaks my heart the most.
Valerie took a sip of wine, a finger coming up to wipe away the wetness by her eyes that just kept coming. She realised then what had been disturbing her the most about the discovery of the baby book, more so than the name ‘Fredericks’: it was her mother’s story, in her own words. It made it real, somehow, more real than anything she’d heard before.
Madame Joubert read out another passage, smiling through her own misty eyes.
I have been blessed with an easy baby. While I have no sphere of reference to judge, I know, I feel certain that in this I have been luckier than most. Valerie sleeps through the night. I have to confess to waking her up sometimes just because I have missed her. M does not approve.
Madame Joubert topped up their glasses. Then she nodded. ‘I have something I also want to share with you.’
She went across the room to a handsome antique writing desk with clawed feet, the wood polished and shining in the low amber light. She unlocked the desk with a key that had turned green with age. Inside was a stack of letters.
‘Your mother wrote to me, while I was in Spain. She couldn’t send them, of course, but she wrote to me anyway.’
She sniffed, her nose red. ‘We found them later, beneath the mattress in her room, after…’ She let out a small breath.
After she died, Valerie realised. Her fingers shook as she took the small stack from Madame Joubert. They were bound together with florist’s string.
Madame Joubert hesitated. ‘I – I am glad that you found that book first,’ she said, indicating the leather-bound diary. ‘It shows that there was a moment before the fear and the worry when they were happy, and almost like any other normal parents. These show’ – she made a small noise in the back of her throat to clear it – ‘some of her initial tensions. I wondered all this week if I should share it with you, in case you got the wrong idea, judged her perhaps too harshly… she was very worried about the pregnancy at first, and it made things at home very tense.’
Valerie frowned as she looked down at the stack of letters, a small curl of anxiety entering her heart.
Later that night, listening to the sound of Dupont’s snores, she opened the first of the letters. She noted the scrawl of her mother’s handwriting, how the neat, slanted hand seemed rushed, how the letters flew, some half formed: a sign of her fears and doubts, Valerie realised.
My Dearest Clotilde,
The baby is beginning to grow. Mattaus says it is healthy, despite our limited diet. It grows strong despite it. I should be happy, but I am not. All I feel is fear. It consumes me night and day. Two weeks ago, a pregnant woman who was rumoured to have shared a bed with a German officer was pushed into the street by an angry mob after the news broke about those students who were arrested for going on a protest march. She fell, and someone kicked her. The baby was stillborn. Papa said that was a blessing in disguise for the child. I couldn’t believe that he would think that, let alone say it. I was so angry with him. But I have to confess that it would be easier if I hadn’t fallen pregnant. It’s the child I worry most about… what will happen when it is born, what if we are not there to protect it and an angry mob turns on it? I can’t sleep at night with these thoughts running through my head.
Papa has suggested that I go to the countryside for the birth – to a nunnery in Haute-Provence. But the truth is, why would they help a Nazi’s wife? Besides, Mattaus would be devastated. He has a vision of us just living a normal life, and I’m trying so hard to believe it could be possible. That this horrible war could come to an end soon…
Perhaps it will. Sometimes when I can’t sleep, I think of you in Spain and it brings me comfort. I imagine you in the countryside, somewhere warm, tasting olives, and that one day I will come too. I hope you are well, and that you have put on some of the weight you lost. I think of you so often – I wish there was a way I could actually send this to you, hear your voice. I miss you every day. I found myself staring too hard the other day at a woman with red hair and lips. I didn’t even know how to explain why I was crying. But she was kind all the same when she offered me her handkerchief. I wonder if she would be so kind if she knew my secret… and when I start to show.
M.
Despite the shock of her mother’s words, Valerie kept on reading, discovering that in some ways her mother’s fears were proven true. As time went on, according to one letter, and Mireille began to show, some of their regular customers stopped coming to the bookshop. Worse was how bitter Dupont had become at the whole scenario.
He just can’t accept it. I can see him trying to like Mattaus every day, trying to put aside his doubts, and then every evening having them return like a weight he carries with him, like Atlas. He told me that it was bad enough that I had slept with M, but marrying the man was something he just couldn’t understand… I told him that M didn’t want his child to grow up a bastard, and he said, ‘Won’t it be bad enough that the father is a Nazi?’ I spent all night crying at that, Clotilde. It’s just not who M is… not really…
Valerie closed her eyes. Her grandfather’s fears were exactly what she herself had thought when she’d found out. She felt for her mother, trying so hard to convince her father that Mattaus was a good man. That he wasn’t like the others.
If he could just get to know him I think he’d understand, he’d see.
Valerie wondered if Mireille had written to Clotilde because she knew that her friend would understand – that of all of them, Mattaus had risked everything, turned traitor, for her. For that, at least, he deserved her love, her trust.
As dawn crested the horizon, and Valerie worked her way through half of the letters, she found that as time passed, her mother’s fears began to subside somewhat as her and Mattaus’s excitement at having a baby started to take root.
M brought home a gem squash from the market today. It’s been weeks since we had anything so exotic – it’s usually turnips for our dinner and if we’re lucky the occasional potato. M says that’s the size of the baby now. He paid a ridiculous sum for the vegetable. I didn’t allow anyone to eat it for three days, while I stared at it like an idiot and it turned wrinkly. How you would have laughed at me as I cried when they boiled it for dinner!
Valerie found that it was around this time that Mireille had got the baby book.
I want to keep a record of everything. Men don’t really remember this kind of thing. And Maman didn’t keep a diary so I don’t know how she felt, becoming a mother for the first time. I wish she were here now… she’d know what to say… M has been wonderful throughout, making me put aside my fears. There’s so much wonder in his eyes at the thought of being a father. He keeps bringing home little thing
s. Pink things – you can see he wants a girl. I hope it won’t break his heart if it’s a boy…
It was like stepping back in time, and experiencing it with her. When Mireille wrote of the new clothing rations, Valerie felt she could picture her frustration at not having anything that fitted while being heavily pregnant.
I’ve had to resort to making these shapeless maternity smocks, as Papa calls them. They look like patchwork quilts – you know how miserably I failed at sewing. I didn’t have your skills. I can imagine you, Clotilde, with a cigarette between your red lips whipping up some creation that could rival Madame Chanel’s. I, on the other hand, have created two lopsided tents out of my old dresses, and I alternate these two sad garments day in and day out, because when I am no longer pregnant, that’s it – I won’t be able to buy more clothes. But it’s all workable really, apart from the shoes… my ankles are the size of melons and the only things that fit are a pair of house slippers. You wouldn’t think I’d get so big on such a limited diet… but there you go. The baby is the size of a marrow now. Sadly M couldn’t secure one for our dinner…
In the morning, bleary eyed from lack of sleep, Valerie made herself a strong cup of coffee and read the last of the letters.
The dark liquid missed her lips as she read of the first confrontation her mother had with Valter Kroeling. She quickly got up to get a dishcloth, sponging the paper where the amber liquid had left its stain, as if to highlight the darkness that lay there.
I was at the market when I ran into Kroeling. I’ve been going to the one in Montmartre… I go there, I confess, because no one knows me there. There’s less chance of someone I know coming up to me and asking questions about the baby… and the father. I had got the week’s groceries – there’s so little now with the rations, hardly any meat. We eat our weight in turnips. Anyway, when I turned away with my string bag, I saw across the street – Kroeling. My legs started to shake, and I grew faint, turning quickly, hoping to hurry away before he saw me, but it was too late. Before I knew it, the vile man was before me, spinning me around, staring at my tent dress in disbelief, his eyes full of hate. ‘You’re pregnant.’
I tried to wrench my arm away from his, but he was strong, twisting it, enjoying my pain as I pleaded for him to let me go. He had that same look on his face as that time he came at me… and I felt so much fear, but he used his words this time, instead of hitting me. His face twisted in a mixture of lust and pure vile hatred as his gaze raked over me. ‘Didn’t take you long, did it?’ His eyes were on my chest, which has become something of an explosion lately. ‘It suits you. I think I’ll take you somewhere so we can see how much.’ I shouted at him to let me go and he just laughed at me. ‘Or what? You will call your doctor boyfriend on me?’
I said yes, that Mattaus would make sure his superiors knew how he was pestering me.
Which was when he laughed and pointed at a new emblem on his shirt. ‘Superiors? See that? That means I am now a major.’
‘So?’ I said.
His eyes glittered. ‘It means that dear old Herr Fredericks has to answer to me now…’
I felt myself pale at that. When I got home I told Mattaus, though he wasn’t worried about Kroeling’s promotion, just my run-in with him. He told me that the printing press they used to run out of the bookshop has grown larger so it doesn’t make sense to bring it back here, and with Kroeling’s advanced duties it means he is now more involved in checking things like the borders, and arranging other issues. One of those, I hate to say, has to do with the Jews. News has reached us that they have started rounding them up and taking them to internment camps. Papa told me that one of the people who were taken was our old piano teacher, Madame Avril. How I cried when I heard. I begged Mattaus to do something – but what can one man do? It’s the most awful, hateful thing. I despise myself for being so pathetically grateful that you are safe, or at least I hope you are… when I know they are not. I hate this war and these Nazis… and what they have done to us all.
M was sick when he heard about what they have done. It turns out his grandfather was Jewish. I heard him retching in the night. I know he knows more than he tells me. I wonder if he feels so ill because he worries they will find out about his grandfather, or because the people he grew up with are capable of such monstrous things. Perhaps it is both…
Valerie set down the stack of letters, and put them beneath a pile of paperwork on her bistro desk as Dupont shuffled into the bookshop.
She looked at the old man – there were so many questions she had for him. So many things she wanted – needed – to understand. She opened her mouth – heart racing – as she prepared to speak the words she had kept from him for so long. The secret she needed to share. She cleared her throat and he looked at her with a frown. ‘Did you take a bath in your coffee today?’ he asked, looking at her with a frown, his lips amused.
She looked down and saw that all over her white top were dark coffee dribbles. By the time she had looked up again, the moment had passed, and all she felt as she went upstairs to change, the letters clutched beneath her arm, was bone tired.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
A week later, to her shock, Valerie discovered something she had in common with her mother.
She was pregnant. Or at least, she might be. She looked at her small school diary, in which she wrote things like ‘ten a.m., hair appointment’, and frowned as she paged back through the past several weeks to the last time she had written a little red X for her period.
She put her head in her hands. She was smarter than this – or at least, so she’d thought. She and Freddy had used protection. Except, well… maybe not always, she realised with mounting dread. She thought back to a drunken evening a few weeks ago when Freddy had run out of condoms and she had blithely, drunkenly declared, ‘What harm will just the once do…’
Oh. Good. God, she thought now. While the fact that she and Freddy loved each other gave her some comfort, this was not how she would have pictured this happening… with her sleeping in a tiny child’s bed pretending to be somebody named Isabelle Henry, and with Freddy renting the world’s worst garret.
When she stood up, she felt the world spin, and ran to the toilet to be sick, hoping it wasn’t the start of morning sickness.
Later that evening, while Dupont was out doing some shopping, she made herself a cup of tea and sat reading the baby book in the kitchen, planning to put it back where she’d found it afterwards. But she found herself looking at it more and more. It suddenly meant even more to her with her current fears. She didn’t hear Dupont come into the kitchen – so engrossed was she that she startled when he touched her shoulder. She made to hide the book, looking shiftily from it to Dupont, but she could tell by his expression that he had already seen. His face had grown pale, and she momentarily lost the power of speech.
‘I – M’sieur Dupont – I am sorry. I found it by the cookbooks…’ She could have kicked herself for reading it in here – if she’d kept it in her room he never would have known.
A muscle flexed in his jaw, and he snapped it up from the table and shoved it under his arm. His blue eyes were intense with anger, and she looked down, swallowing.
‘So you thought you would just read it – even though it was someone’s private possession.’
Valerie closed her eyes, shame flooding her cheeks. ‘I – I shouldn’t have, I apologise.’
His face was livid. He opened his mouth, then shut it again. She could tell that it was taking a lot for him to keep his calm. For someone as hot-blooded as he could be, this made her feel worse, made her feel the gravity of his disappointment. He took a deep breath and said, ‘I shouldn’t have left it here if I didn’t want it read.’
Then he turned and walked out. She saw on the table the string bag from the supermarket, filled with tea bags, scones, a pot of strawberry jam and cream, and felt terrible. He had obviously been thinking of her when he went to the shops, which only made it worse. He had been doing a lot of that late
ly, getting English things for her – it seemed so out of character, and sweet, and it made her feel truly awful for hurting him now.
She followed him to the living room, where he had settled with the evening’s newspaper, a cigarette between his lips, a deep frown between his eyes. He was literally hiding behind the pages.
When she tried to discuss the baby book with him, he told her to just leave it alone. ‘It’s forgotten, leave it be.’ His tone was cool; his manner said drop it.
But still she could tell he couldn’t. The following day there was tension between them all day, and Valerie began to worry that if this was how he would take her just looking at her mother’s things, how was he going to take the news that she was the grandchild he had given away – returned now to live here in secret?
She sighed, and went for a walk, ending up at Freddy’s. There was so much she had to tell him – starting with the news that she was possibly pregnant, but she kept that to herself for now. She would tell him when she knew for sure, she decided. So she told him what had happened. About the baby book.
He was sitting on the mattress, the green typewriter on his lap. His shirt was unbuttoned. ‘A book of your first months? Wow.’
She nodded. Wow indeed. ‘It was… I don’t know how to explain, aside from wonderful, mostly, to find it. It’s not big – I mean, the entries are just little observations, sentences scattered through various weeks, but here and there, it’s a record of a mother’s love, and knowing it was about me, I…’
She bit her lip, and felt the tears start to form. ‘It just makes it so real. What was taken from me – who was taken from me during this war. I would have loved to have known her.’
