Together at the Table

by Hillary Manton Lodge

  I protested, but he wouldn’t listen to a single argument. “I must know that if the worst comes, you will be safe.”

  I didn’t know what else to do, after the long weeks of silence and distance. I reached a hand to cup his face, and lifted my lips to his. He started in surprise, but responded swiftly, gathering me into his arms and kissing me with a passion that startled us both.

  When I was younger, I did not believe Gilles to be capable of such passion. I believed the fields to be his first love.

  And perhaps that was true. The poets write often of the power and purity of first loves. But I wonder at the power in a second love, a love that follows experience, loss, or disappointment.

  For a moment in the passageway I wondered if, perhaps, our marriage might become more than a legal union.

  But Gilles pulled away, though not without three more kisses—like an ellipsis, promising more but ending just the same.

  He said something—I barely remember what, my sense had not yet returned—and led me back to the central doorway to the west drawing room. He deposited me there before disappearing back down the stairs.

  I still feel jumpy, as if he will appear in a doorway and we will discover what lies on the other end of the ellipsis. For shame. There is a war on, after all.

  I believe I shall find Gabrielle and tidy up the greenhouse garden. If my thoughts are to be distracted, I might as well do something useful with my hands.

  “Even the cool parts like the secret tunnels get turned into kissing parts,” Nico said mournfully.

  I leveled a stern gaze at my brother. “This is your grandmother’s diary. If you want secret tunnels and explosions, go read Dan Brown.”

  “You know I’m teasing. And I’m a Pérez-Reverte man.”

  “Where are the tunnels?” Chloé asked.

  “I take guests to them with tours,” Sandrine answered. “It’s part of our marketing—a chateau with secret passageways! Everyone loves them. But I keep them locked up so that no one goes wandering.”

  I winced. “That could end badly.”

  Chloé leaned forward. “Could you show them to us?”

  “Mais oui, but of course.”

  So we left our places at the table and followed Sandrine. She led us to a small door near the kitchen and unbolted it. “This is the old cellar,” she said. “I don’t take people through the tunnel to the forest anymore. One of these days I’ll have a contractor come and make sure it’s stable enough. Until then, it’s best not to risk it.”

  We followed her down the steps into the cellar, and I immediately wished for a warmer sweater and gloves. “We don’t use this for food storage so often, unless we run out of room.” She walked toward a section of floor and bent down to pull on a metal ring. “This was added later. Papa said that they used a wooden shim to open the door from this side.”

  She lifted the ring, and up came the door in the floor. Sophie gasped.

  Auguste grinned. “After you?”

  Sophie peered down. “Is there—is there a light?”

  Sandrine gave her husband a swat on the arm. “No, there is no light. It is not wired for electricity in there. We give our guests headlamps instead.” She reached toward a box on a shelf. “Who wants to go?”

  Sophie took one, as did most of the others.

  Caterina hung back. “I’m good,” she said.

  Damian put an arm around her. “Small dark spaces are not your thing.”

  “Nope.” She looked over at her boys, both vibrating in excitement. “You can take them. I’ll wait here. Just bring them back, okay?”

  He pressed a kiss to her temple. “You’re very brave in other ways.”

  “I know.” She kissed him back, and the rest of us took turns descending the ladder and into the space.

  “It feels like Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Neil said, resting his hands on his hips as he looked around, the light on his lamp moving with him.

  The floor beneath the ladder was about four feet by four feet, with stairs directly opposite. “This is one of the original passageways,” Sandrine explained. “Some of the ones that my father and uncle constructed by hastily walling off rooms are only connected, floor to floor, by ladders.”

  We followed her up—Chloé with a gaping mouth, Caterina’s boys wide eyed and holding tight to their father’s hands.

  We continued up, the stairs spiraling, until we found the landing that Mireille described in the letter. The bedrolls and tinned foods were long gone, but it still felt, oddly, more recently lived in than the rest of the passageways.

  Auguste led us to the greenhouse on the roof, or what was left of it. “We can garden on the ground now,” he said. “There is too much work with the fields and house to keep it up, but perhaps one day we shall replant. I have fixed the glass, though; it’s been broken by hailstorms a couple times. Several of the panes are now Plexiglas.”

  I looked out the windows. Somehow, these spaces made Mireille’s text even more real—even though I’d been walking the halls of her home.

  The rooftop garden had enough room for everyone, but only just. We looked out onto the fields, brown for winter, and the forest that still bordered the chateau.

  After several minutes, we made our way back through, our eyes having to readjust to the light of the kitchen after emerging.

  Caterina sat at the farmhouse table, cake plate in hand. “Lovely time?”

  I gave her a sisterly hug. “Let’s go find a fire to sit near. I think that’s what Mireille would have us do.”

  Food is symbolic of love when words are inadequate.

  —ALAN D. WOLFELT

  “Did your mom ever talk about the war years?” I asked Sandrine after Caterina and the others left to turn in for the night.

  “A little. Different parts of Provence were hit harder than others. In many places, crops rotted in the ground, she said, because there weren’t enough laborers to harvest them. But the family fared better than most at the chateau because of the efforts of my father and Oncle Gilles. Gilles could not fight because of his eyesight, and my father had served in the army for two years before returning to Provence.” Sandrine set her coffee cup down. “He wasn’t a soldier and he knew it—he considered it his duty to stay out of battle. My father and Gilles managed much of the labor of the farm. So there was food, and as we have read, they were very careful to preserve it. The rest is all information I have gathered for myself. She spoke of it very little.”

  “It was a difficult time. I can understand not wanting to relive it.” I hugged my arms to myself as questions ran through my head. One question poked at my mind, but I kept it to myself and finished the rest of my coffee.

  Caterina offered to read the next morning as we sat in the sunny front room. “We just have a couple more days. I think we need to blaze through some, don’t you?”

  I sighed. Neil squeezed my hand.

  I wanted to leave and didn’t, all at the same time. I hated to leave the coziness of Provence in the winter—but home?

  Home meant new adventures with Neil, new projects, new challenges—and I couldn’t wait.

  I leaned against Neil as Caterina began to read.

  Dearest Gabriel,

  When I began this diary over the summer, I had recently learned of your death, watched the invasion of our home by soldiers, fled the city, married a man I did not love, and saved a daughter by letting her go.

  I miss you.

  But you’re gone. I can’t think about it much. I can only hope that you received a proper burial somehow. I have to remind myself that your spirit, your beautiful soul, is far from that place. And I like to think that a part of you remains with me, with our girls.

  Maybe it’s the war, maybe it’s the routine of the chateau having so little to do with our life in Paris. But our life—mine and Gabrielle’s—feels so separate.

  So perhaps that’s why. Because my life and Gabrielle’s is now so deeply entwined with Gilles’s, I feel as though my initial perceptions
of him have changed.

  To begin: I no longer hate or resent him.

  For a long while, I believed him to have insinuated himself into my family, into my life, for the sake of the land. I don’t believe that anymore. He loves the land, but he loves people more. That love is simply expressed differently. Quietly, but no less real.

  He’s sacrificed a great deal to be here, to be working the land, to be caring for me and Gabrielle.

  My feelings for him have changed. Is it love? Is it gratitude?

  I don’t know—and I’m not sure that it matters.

  I joined Tante Joséphine in the drawing room this morning. We sat and knitted together, speaking of this and that.

  And then she asked about Gilles, and about our marriage.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  She asked if we intended to stay married, and I told her I believed so, but I wasn’t sure exactly.

  And then she lifted her eyebrow, and said rather dryly, “You probably ought to figure that out.”

  I don’t think she’s wrong. And then I confessed that there had been some showings of affection, which had not been unpleasant, but that it had caused me to grieve the loss of you all the more. And to worry that it was too soon for me to love another husband.

  There were also the words I couldn’t voice. My worries that my heart might be softening for Gilles only because I have been so long without your touch. That I might be feeling affection only to rationalize a chance to be held in a man’s arms again.

  Tante Joséphine put her knitting down and took my hand.

  She said that she knew that I loved you very much, and that I had honored you during our time together, and honored you after your death.

  She told me about how she felt when she and her husband were trying—and failing—to have children. For years they didn’t travel, and she avoided buying new dresses because she thought she’d outgrow them with a pregnancy soon enough.

  But after the years passed, she realized they couldn’t live like that forever. They didn’t give up, not yet, but they traveled to Spain, Portugal, Egypt, and America. She bought beautiful clothes that she liked.

  “We never had a child, as you know,” she said. “But we lived our life and we had a happy marriage. We found a way to enjoy the life we had. So I believe the same may be true of you. You don’t have the life you’d wish. But you have a daughter who needs a father, and a husband—a living husband—who loves you.”

  When I protested, she raised an eyebrow and silenced me rather effectively before continuing.

  “You have a husband who loves you. There is no sin, no shame in living a life with him.”

  I have carried those words with me these last several hours.

  My dearest, I miss you. But it may be time for me to love another.

  Dearest Gabriel,

  I waited up for Gilles last night. After I put Gabrielle to bed, I took a bath and slipped into my coziest nightgown. I lit my lamp and read a book until I heard Gilles’s footsteps and he opened the door.

  He nodded when he saw me. Whatever he’d been doing, he’d been hard at work—his hair curled with sweat, his shirt clung to his shoulders and torso.

  He took a bath, and I thought back to the night he’d returned from Toulouse, when he’d fallen asleep in the tub. Tonight, however, I could hear movement, splashes of water, and then the chug of the water down the drain.

  Shortly after, he returned to the bedroom, this time dressed in pajamas and smelling of lavender and lemon.

  I set my book aside and waited as he climbed into bed.

  I asked if he meant for us to stay married after the war, and he met my gaze and held it.

  We have been so skittish around each other for weeks that I drank in the sight of his eyes.

  He took my hand and said that he loved me, that he has always loved me. His thumb caressed the inside of my palm as he said that he wished we might have married under different circumstances, but that he had not wished to end our union. He admitted that he had not expressed his love well when he was young, before I left.

  As sweet as his words were, I had difficulty focusing on them, for the feel of his thumb stroking my hand had me dizzy.

  He repeated that he loved me, and that he loved Gabrielle, and he would have us be married always, if I would have him.

  Gilles isn’t you, Gabriel. His face, his scent, the calluses on his hands. Until that moment, I think I’d been afraid that if I loved Gilles, really loved him, there would be no room left for you in my heart.

  But in that moment, I wondered if maybe love creates space, rather than taking it away. Because I felt love for Gilles, but that love didn’t crowd you out. It simply made my heart larger.

  I leaned forward and kissed him then—he might have talked all night if I hadn’t.

  This kiss was different from the other two we’d shared.

  The first was a kiss of reintroduction; the other tangled in feelings of fear, relief, and gratitude.

  This one: gentle, accepting. Gilles reached for my face, brushing my hair away and cupping my cheek.

  It was the gentle kiss a groom might give a young bride.

  But I was no blushing bride, and Gilles had waited a long time.

  I awoke a little disoriented in the morning light, unused to the feel of waking in a man’s arms. I rolled over to see Gilles, sound asleep, his arm still draped across my body. The memories flooded back, and for a moment I began to panic.

  But just as my mind began to whir, fearing I’d made a mistake, had acted foolishly, Gilles opened his eyes and gave me a sleepy smile. That smile reminded me that he was Gilles Bessette, the boy I’d grown up with, the man I’d grown to trust.

  So I smiled back and curled deeper into his arms. It felt like a revelation, being close to someone again.

  We missed breakfast. Gilles has gone to the kitchen for a tray.

  Caterina paused. The room remained dead quiet; Caterina resumed reading without comment.

  Dearest Gabriel,

  I’m tempted to hide in the greenhouse until the rest of the household retires for the night.

  Tante Joséphine has looked all day like the cat who ate the canary.

  Cécile pulled me aside at the first opportunity for the sort of frank discussion that passes between sisters.

  Apparently, Gilles has had an air of je ne sais quoi that spoke of pleasing marital relations. I tried to get Cécile to describe it, but she shrugged in a knowing way that is particularly infuriating, coming from a younger sister. I was the one who was supposed to know everything. And then she said my cheeks were glowing, and I glared at her.

  You’d think there wasn’t a war on and there was nothing else to think of—I miss the privacy of our Paris garret.

  But I suppose in its own way, seeing love unfold is its own kind of hope. That if something good and pleasant can happen, maybe goodness can happen in the world as well.

  You’d be pleased to know the girls are well, everyone is healthy. Alice has taken to hugging Cécile’s growing belly.

  We’ve become friends, Alice and I, though I confess I maintain my distance out of self-protection. She prefers Cécile and Marise, but is glad to have me near, especially if I’m willing to play games.

  Her dark curls have grown longer, reminding me of your hair before a haircut.

  But she is safe and loved.

  And Gabrielle is safe and loved. In these days, we are foolish to wish for more.

  My dearest Gabriel,

  Our days have been happy. Gilles and I work side by side many days, tending the greenhouse together, and if we are apart—if I am canning apples in the kitchen, or baking bread, or pickling beets—he will find me every few hours, place a hand on my waist, a short kiss on my lips, sweep the hair from my brow.

  Just a short moment, and then we return to our responsibilities.

  He is a good partner. He is good to me.

  His Christmas hat is completed, as well as one glove, with Ta
nte Joséphine’s help. The second glove…that one may come after the holiday. Or perhaps I shall save it for Epiphany.

  My dearest Gabriel,

  Christmas brought shepherds to our kitchen door—Armand and his son Jean-Luc. They came with a woman and two children, and begged to come inside.

  One look at their faces and I knew them to be Jews. Forgive me, dearest, I thought to turn them away. I wanted nothing more than the safety of Gabrielle and Alice, and feared that might be compromised if we brought Jews into our home.

  I’m so ashamed, and grateful that it was not a question left to me, for I would have failed so, so very deeply.

  Instead, they were met first by Françoise, whose soul is better than mine, and then by Gilles.

  Gilles spoke with Armand for a moment before taking the small family to the wing we have closed off. He nodded to me, in a gesture that told me to trust him, that everything would be fine.

  I was ready to turn away refugees at Christmastime. My soul is wretched.

  Dearest Gabriel,

  I have not seen the refugees since their arrival; Gilles squirreled them away in the east wing. But I have spent extra time in the kitchen, cooking extra food to send to them. I didn’t see much of them when they arrived, but they did look skinny, and we have more food than most.

  I’m trying.

  I’m also having nightmares again, dreaming of soldiers arriving at the door to take the girls away before pointing a gun at me, soldiers finding us at the neighbor’s apartment, more guns. The guns fire and I wake up, terrified.

  Gilles pulls me close and strokes my hair and holds me until I stop sobbing and fall back asleep. It is nice having a husband again, in that way, but I do feel guilty about how much I’m interrupting his sleep.