The Silent Hours

by Cesca Major

Just when I expect him to make his goodbyes he drags the stool closer towards me and sits down. When he looks at me his blue eyes seem enormous behind the thick lenses of his glasses. I shift a little under his gaze.

  ‘I see you have a notebook there. I’d be most grateful to know a little more about you. Can you write some answers to my questions?’

  I reach for the notebook and pencil on the side table and open up a page towards the back of the book in affirmation.

  ‘What is your name?’

  I write: Adeline.

  ‘Surname?’

  I don’t remember.

  Even as I write I feel a name nudging in my subconscious, just out of reach. Am I always doomed to repeat the same memories and not recall my own name?

  ‘Can you remember when you last spoke?’

  In my neat hand I respond.

  Years ago.

  ‘Can you be more precise?’

  Before.

  ‘Before? Before what, madame?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Are you from the region?’

  I shake my head from side to side, scrawling: No.

  ‘Which region?’

  Sister Marguerite has asked me this before.

  I write Limousin.

  ‘Ah! Famous for la vache Limousine.’ He chuckles.

  I nod.

  He appears to have run out of questions.

  ‘Madame, if I may – may I take a look at your throat?’ He produces a torch from his shirt pocket. ‘Open up.’ He leans towards me and I duly obey. He inspects the insides of my mouth for a few moments, tilting his head this way and that, exploring every corner with the light and then, standing upright, he snaps off the torch, musing aloud: ‘Had a room-mate in the war from that area. Terribly nice chap.’

  My pencil hovers.

  ‘Whereabouts exactly are you from, madame, in the region?’ He looks at my notebook, expecting me to write down the answer to his question.

  My hand wavers.

  He looks at me. ‘When you lost your voice, was it after an accident, a fall perhaps? A knock to the head?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘But it came on suddenly, something triggered it?’

  A pause as he holds my gaze. I nod slowly.

  He persists. ‘The nuns tell me you arrived late summer of ’44. Where had you been up to then? Where was your home?’

  I turn my face away from him, the pencil drops to the floor.

  The doctor is still standing, waiting for my response. ‘Madame,’ he states. ‘Madame, if you could help me to understand. May I?’

  He reaches for my notebook.

  I surrender it to him.

  He reads snatches of the start, moments, dreams. He studies a sketch, lightly drawn. It is a girl’s face.

  He hands it back to me, searches my face. He has kind eyes. ‘I hope very much, madame, to help you find your voice.’

  He packs away his things, wrapping them carefully and placing them in his bag. I watch him as he shrugs on his coat, picks up his bag.

  ‘I will see you tomorrow, madame.’ He walks to the door, one hand lifting the latch before he turns and looks at me still on the bed. ‘Please let me help you.’

  I lie back, staring ahead, hearing voices in the corridor just outside. The door finally thuds closed and the words are muffled.

  I turn to the page in the notebook. She is smiling at me. Something in my chest flutters: a whisper. I remember more.

  ISABELLE

  There is a wedding today – Claudette’s younger sister is marrying a boy in the village, about the only one left. As a farmer he might be left alone a while longer. They’re both eighteen.

  We are making our way to the church. Papa is pushing the big, old, navy-blue pram down the street. It bounces over the cobbles and makes Sebastien gurgle from inside. Grown women smile and coo before they have even peered over to see the baby inside. Papa reaches down now and again to tuck in a stray corner of blanket. A needless action, but one we all do: any excuse to fuss over him.

  There are still a few stares, a few whispers behind gloved hands, but I link arms with Maman and pretend not to notice. I can feel her bristling as we walk. She looks soft today, wearing cream suede gloves Papa bought her years ago in Saint-Junien, and a floral dress that he loves. I’m wearing an old tea dress and finally feel my waist has returned. A tiny veiled hat is perched on top of my hair – which needs a trim – and as I look through the netting, the whole street has been divided into tiny little squares.

  The church has been decked out in flowers, in stands around the edge and on the end of pews in small bunches. The light grey walls are lifted and the sun blazes through the high, arched windows above the congregation. We side-step along a pew to take up our place towards the back. The scent of the flowers wafts around the church, finding every crevice, and my heart lifts when we all sing together. On the pew in front of us, pew cushions hang on bronze hooks – there is one that Maman made. She has just finished another one decorated with an image of a lily in white, outlined in yellow thread, a background of deep blue.

  The church is full of faces, some familiar, others from neighbouring villages or further afield. In the front pew stands the proud mother, her eyes already glistening with unshed tears as she waits to see her daughter walk down the aisle. Beside her Claudette wears a steel-grey dress and a black wool cloche hat, as if she is attending a funeral.

  The bride appears, faltering a little, her hair in a chignon laced with flowers. Then a smile behind her veil as she spots her equally nervous groom, standing waiting, wringing his hands, the small purple flower in his buttonhole already drooping in the heat. He is shorter than Sebastien, squat, broad in the shoulders, a tanned face suggesting that he is probably more at home baling hay than trussed up in his suit. For a moment I daydream of my own groom, the wedding we dreamed we would have. I glance down at Sebastien and almost whisper out loud, ‘One day.’ I think of his father’s last words to me, his plan to get across to England. I haven’t heard anything for weeks, pray he is safe somewhere, squeeze my eyes shut.

  We emerge into the day and I take Maman’s arm and squeeze her elbow. She leans her body towards me, head almost resting on mine. I know she wants this for me, that she wants someone to come back and claim me.

  We dance into the night in a marquee put up for the occasion; hay bales are scattered around for seating, rugs an attempt to soften the uneven ground. The evening is still and perfect, as if God had planned it all for the newlywed couple. As we step through the canvas, the smells and sounds pervade every pore. A local band are stamping their feet and playing old folk songs, while spinning girls and laughing children are squealing and scampering. Waiting girls tap their feet longingly, sitting perched like birds, heads darting one side to the other in search of a partner, looking longingly at a friend when an elusive hand is proffered.

  Cider is being drunk, glasses overflowing from a barrel, so sickly sweet that it makes my head spin after the first few sips. Old men savour a last cigar; nearby, an enormous roasting pig rotates on a spit over the flames, its mouth wide open, screaming its last as it turns slowly, slowly, exuding the most delicious smells, its skin darkening at every turn. Tables are piled high with offerings from the women in the village, ration tickets pooled, other favours called in: clafoutis, bowls of lush peaches, meringues and every variety of cheese that this part of France can offer. I see Tristan, one of my most mischievous pupils, reaching up to stick his finger in the middle of the brie, earning himself a scolding from his mother. I hide a laugh in my hand as he catches my eye over her shoulder.

  The portly Monsieur Lefèvre, slumped in a corner, sinks lower and lower as I watch, until his body is almost flat on the ground, head crooked awkwardly at an angle. His wife steps over him to get some more dessert. Beyond them I catch the newly-weds in a quie
t embrace, oblivious to jostling male friends making lewd jokes about things they know nothing about. They look at the groom in admiration and bewilderment: he has taken those first, tentative steps.

  I feel removed from them all, carrying my own secrets.

  Everyone glows in the evening light and the noise of talk and laughter and music merges so that I think that this is what happiness sounds like. I am exhausted, slouched on a hay bale, my son in my arms as I watch his grandmother move cautiously around the dance floor, one hand stiffly resting on the shoulder of Papa as he steers her around in the throng. Sebastien and I watch from our perch. He gurgles and my heart fills with love for him. I can feel his little frame, so small; he smiles and stretches his arms up as if dancing to the music. Papa comes over to take him home, takes him from me so carefully, kisses the top of my head.

  Maman and I walk back down the high street. The moon is barely out tonight, muffled by cloud, and we stumble, giggling a little childishly, both full of cider and the mood of the evening.

  ‘Maman,’ I say, stopping in the street and looking at her. ‘Sebastien’s father is a Jew.’

  I can see her confusion moving from one moment to the next, and then she repeats the words so slowly and quietly: ‘A Jew.’

  We walk in silence for a few minutes.

  ‘He bought a tomato,’ she announces.

  I frown. ‘Maman?’And then I remember the time he came to our shop, my surprise at seeing him there.

  ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘England.’

  She nods.

  ‘He doesn’t know about the baby, Maman. I never told him. I couldn’t – I knew he would have stayed and …’ She turns the key in the lock and lowers her voice. ‘How many people know?’

  ‘No one. I know what it can be like,’ I say quietly.

  She opens her mouth as if she is going to add something else but then pushes the door and steps inside.

  Papa is in the kitchen, a tisane warming his hands. He looks at us both as we step into the little room. ‘Isabelle?’ ‘I told Maman.’ ‘You knew?’ she asks him in surprise, looking back at me, hurt. ‘I met him, Adeline. He is a good boy.’

  ‘You met him? Why did I not meet him?’ Her voice rises.

  The anger at our apparent collusion is obvious, her eyes filled with questions, the hurt of feeling left out. I can hear the words as if she has spoken them out loud. Do we not care that her son, my brother, is in prison, that having any kind of association like that might threaten his safe return? How many months have we hidden this from her?

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Papa insists, moving across to her.

  I don’t know why I ruined things. Why I needed to say anything. She had stopped asking months ago. Yet tonight I’d wanted to tell her.

  I feel my throat tighten as Maman stands there, looking so lost.

  Sebastien starts screaming in his room above us and I hurry from the kitchen, leaving them both there.

  Papa’s voice, from the stairs, makes my eyes close. ‘Darling. Adeline.’

  ‘How dare you,’ she breathes.

  I lose his voice halfway through a sentence: ‘We didn’t want to worry you. But I regret it, I should have sa—’ and then I am shushing my baby, lifting him out of his cot, feeling his warm, soft cheek damp with his tears – or mine – as I rock and shush and try to ignore the voices under the floorboards: angry, snapping, as they wash around us, our making.

  The anger doesn’t fade and Maman stamps about the shop the next morning, jaw fixed, short with the customers, refusing to acknowledge me or Papa, leaving the kitchen before we eat breakfast so we are not all in the same room together. She doesn’t look in on Sebastien either.

  I sit behind the counter of the shop, shoulders slumped as she heaves and puffs in the storeroom in the back. But then a voice, a voice from the very depths of my mind, pipes up: ‘What is there to be so serious about?’

  And there, in the doorway, is Paul – our Paul. He stands in the entrance to the shop, his large frame blocking out the light as he towers there, dressed in dirty uniform, his face tired but a smile on his lips.

  The storeroom falls silent and I feel my mother’s presence in the shop. She is standing wordlessly in the doorway at the back, a bag of flour hanging forgotten in her hand as she stares at him from across the shop. The bag falls and before I can react she has walked across the floor to him, her hand reaching up to touch his face, then throwing herself into his arms that have flung out wide.

  My stool scrapes back as I move to join them and, as I do, Sebastien can be heard crying upstairs.

  Paul draws back. ‘What is that?’

  He looks towards the stairs leading up to the flat and at that moment I catch my mother’s eye, a bubble bursts, and we both start to laugh.

  SEBASTIEN

  It is the porcelain figures standing resolutely in the window of a shop on the corner of my street in London that conjure up my mother’s face: her hair drawn back in a low bun, a sliver of silk scarf around her throat, her eyes looking at my father as she dusts around the pieces in the display cabinet. She would hate the fact that no one will have dusted them. I imagine them now, standing in the shadows of the apartment; the shutters, no doubt left open in my haste, a thin line of sunlight highlighting the thin film of dust on their cocked arms, their fragile heads, as they wait for her to return.

  I dream of them.

  The dust has piled, layer upon layer on their delicate china forms so that they are drowning in it; particles in the air, heaped at their feet like a churned-up battleground … still they wait patiently, rigid, hopeful. The dust keeps coming, they are buried now, one delicate wrist protruding from the pile, the tips of the fingers manicured, the elegant arch of the hand pointing skyward until it, too, is lost underneath the dust that keeps coming.

  I wake, snatching at the covers, looking around unseeing in the darkness, remembering France, Spain, London. Lying down again, I focus on my family, Isabelle, feel panic that I can’t see their faces clearly any more – just lines and colours, parts of photographs, no distinct features, just a patchwork quilt that makes up something ugly. Their reality is slipping and now I can feel tears blurring their faces, melting them before me so that they lose their form completely, and become part of the rain, and then I am asleep again.

  My arrival in England had seemed impossible for a time. There were months of travelling, waiting, sleeping nights in outhouses, barns – one awful week in the hold of a ship, arranged by a contact of my father in Spain, praying every moment it wouldn’t be torpedoed. Bedraggled, confused, I was even more lost when I finally made it, realized there were no signs to anywhere and no one in the country spoke my language.

  It seems to rain non-stop so my clothes never quite dry, and have taken on the smell of London permanently: smoke and the press of bodies mingled with the musty smell of soggy cotton. In parts of the city the streets are a warren, narrow and never-ending, and the buzz of so many people in one place is more than I could ever have imagined. They emerge like ants, shoring up their colony.

  I followed Father’s instructions, and stayed with a family he knew in North London for a few days, eating most of their larder in that time. They were leaving for the country, somewhere in the west, and wanted me to join them. But I needed to stay, was restless to feel useful, to be close to where I could get information. I looked around for another arrangement, a flat share. They left me, kisses on both cheeks, a shake of the hand; I promised them I would let them know when there was news.

  I push the door to the flat closed, snapping off my little torch on entering the well-lit living room. Edward is hunched in front of the fire, a dusty bottle of red wine half-finished beside him. He looks up as I shake the rain from my coat in the doorway. ‘Sit down, my friend, sit down.’ He struggles with the s’s a little.

  Cab Calloway is singing in the b
ackground. Edward fell in love with his music after seeing Stormy Weather at the pictures with a girl he was sweet on. I can’t decide whether it’s the jazz or the girl that has him drumming his fingers on the armrest of his chair, a sleepy look to his eyes. The newspaper is open beside him. He has a melancholic habit of reading the lists of men who have died or who are missing when the jazz singers play on the turntable.

  He holds the bottle out to me and in stilted French asks if I want a glass. In fact, the line he slurs roughly translates as: ‘Glass, drink, me,’ and I can’t help but grin at him before accepting it, making a silent toast to him. I don’t ask where he got it from, this rare treat.

  The grey bags under his eyes seem more pronounced in the light from the flames, showing up the thick lines underneath. He is a special constable in the city, a fire warden, while all his spare time is spent furiously cramming revision for his medical exams. Edward Taylor is a wiry chap, all limbs and angles, who’d been turned down in 1940 on account of his terrible eyesight. A pair of glasses, one lens nearly as thick as my little finger, is testament to his affliction. When he doesn’t have them to hand he screws up his eyes and holds his arms out, patting nearby tables for them, his thighs must be spattered with bruises from his various clashes with furniture.

  He, too, understands what it’s like to be largely impotent in a war.

  I pull up the card table in front of the fire and we start to play a convoluted version of gin rummy. He taught me the rules, slowly and patiently, but I still stare stupidly at the collection of diamonds in my hand. We don’t talk – we already know each other’s sorry stories after swapping them in both broken languages after getting wonderfully drunk the evening I moved in. Edward now knows every detail of my life so far, and nearly every detail of my romance with Isabelle. That is the effect of a bottle of brandy.

  Sirens wail. We stagger down flights of stairs to the cellar, pushing open the door to see our neighbours already sitting in huddles on flattened cushions. Light comes from lamps on occasional tables. It’s a strangely comfortable scene, only marred by the woman on the ground floor: a mother of four, whose face is always pale despite the warm glow of the room; her children sleep, oblivious, around her. One man is eating a late dinner off a plate on his lap, joking with Edward in a quiet undertone. My stomach rumbles, the reconstituted eggs and powdered milk I had for dinner in no way adequate.