The Child Left Behind

by Anne Bennett

  Bridgette thought of the rapturous sex she had enjoyed with James just the night before and she said, ‘Of course I’m not. I know only too well how feelings can overcome two people who love each other so much. One thing puzzles me, though.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You said you married my father,’ Bridgette said. ‘And that he was an Irishman. Has he any family and, if so, why have they never written to us?’

  ‘To explain that you had better read these,’ Gabrielle said. She handed Bridgette the two letters she had received from Christy, and Bridgette scanned them both quickly. ‘Christy was Finn’s best friend,’ Gabrielle explained. ‘And he lost a leg in the same place and on the same day that Finn was killed. He was ill and wasn’t able to contact me straightaway. Until I got Christy’s first letter, I had no idea whether Finn was dead or alive. His family were informed of his death, as next of kin. News of our marriage obviously hadn’t reached the army records.’

  ‘I can quite see how it might be like that in a war situation,’ Bridgette said.

  ‘So can I,’ Gabrielle agreed. ‘At the time, though, I was distraught. In fact, the news of Finn’s death caused me to go into labour. But I loved you so much from the first moment I saw you, and the more because you were a part of Finn, the only part that I would ever have. Having you to care for helped me bear his loss.’

  ‘I know that feeling so well,’ Bridgette said. ‘Even now I regret that I lost Xavier’s baby. But, according to the other letter from this Christy, my father was under age to marry you and so his date of birth on the marriage lines is false.’

  ‘Yes.’ Gabrielle said. ‘Neither of us knew if that made the marriage legal or not.’

  ‘I don’t know either,’ Bridgette admitted. ‘It’s not something I have ever thought about, but I can quite see why neither of you said anything, particularly as you were living with Grandfather Jobert at the time.’

  Gabrielle nodded. ‘We dared not contact the people in Ireland either,’ she continued. ‘There was a war on at the time, anyway, but even afterwards.’ She looked at Bridgette. ‘The false entry on the marriage certificate was done for my sake, to give me the respectability of marriage. If that false entry made the marriage null and void and any got to know about it, can you imagine how hard our lives would have been, Bridgette? And I am not trying to pretend that, as it was, we had a bed of roses, anyway.’

  Bridgette nodded. ‘I would have been known as a bastard all through my growing up, and you a fallen woman. I fully understand the secrecy.’

  ‘Robert Legrand might not have been so keen to marry me either,’ Gabrielle said. ‘Mind you, that would be no bad thing.’

  ‘Why did you marry him?’ Bridgette asked. ‘I often wondered, even when I thought he was my father.’

  ‘Your grandfather forced me into it,’ Gabrielle said. ‘He said that if I didn’t marry Robert he would put us both on the street. I had you to care for, and no money, and so I had no alternative.’

  ‘That’s despicable,’ Bridgette said, ‘Why didn’t my grandfather like me?

  Gabrielle didn’t insult Bridgette’s intelligence by claiming he did. She deserved total honesty. ‘I think it was because I had brought shame on the house and you were the evidence of that, though you might have had an easier time if you had been a boy. He craved sons and had none and so he was relying on grandsons.’

  ‘And that’s why he disinherited me in the will,’ Bridgette said. ‘I think he was a nasty piece of work. I don’t want to think or talk about him any more. Will you tell me all you know about my real father instead?’

  ‘I will gladly,’ Gabrielle said. And she told Bridgette all she knew about Finn’s birth on a farm in Ireland and his family. However, when she heard about his eldest sister, Aggie, who had disappeared when he had been a small boy and she just fifteen years old Bridgette was as affected as Gabrielle had been when she had first heard it.

  ‘Did they never find out what had happened to her?’

  ‘No. It was if she had disappeared into thin air, Finn said. He said he was very upset at the time, because she was ten when he had been born and she had been like a mother to him.’

  She looked at Bridgette levelly then, before saying, ‘After I am gone, maybe you could see them for yourself. They are your family. My father kept my marriage lines, but when he died I went through his papers and retrieved that and your birth certificate. They are both in the box and I shouldn’t think that a false entry on my marriage certificate matters after all this time.’

  Bridgette shook her head. ‘These people are strangers to me, Maman,’ she said. ‘It was you who should have sought them out.’

  ‘It wasn’t possible for me’ Gabrielle said. ‘But my time here is nearly done. Hopefully I’ll go to a better place, but it’s you that I worry about. I don’t want you alone.’

  ‘What if James comes back?’

  Gabrielle was silent for a minute and then she said quietly, ‘Don’t be cross with me, Bridgette. I truly have no wish to hurt you, and I’m sure James meant every word he said at the time, but if he survives the war there might be a hundred and one reasons why he cannot return for you.’

  Bridgette couldn’t be cross with her mother because she had thought the very same thing, so what she did say was, ‘You needn’t worry about me, you know. I am a big girl now and don’t need looking after. Please tell me where you met my father.’

  ‘I met him here in the town,’ Gabrielle said. ‘He was batman to one of the officers in the British Headquarters and that officer had a fancy for my father’s bread and cakes and he used to send Finn for them. From the moment I first saw him there was some sort of pull between us.’

  ‘Ah, Maman! It’s so romantic.’

  Gabrielle smiled wistfully. ‘I thought so too.’ She went on to tell Bridgette of their walks in the park on Sunday afternoons, which had to be curtailed when the weather grew colder. And how Finn had eventually found the deserted farmhouse and the way she would climb down the tree outside her bedroom window into Finn’s waiting arms.

  Bridgette’s eyes opened wider as she said, ‘There is no tree outside that room, there’s just a stump in the yard.’

  ‘My father had it cut down when he found out how I had been sneaking out of the house,’ Gabrielle said. ‘And had those bars fitted to the windows.’

  ‘I often wondered about those,’ Bridgette said. ‘Oh, Maman, thank you for telling me all this, but do you want to stop now? I don’t want to tire you out.’

  ‘It’s pleasant remembering,’ Gabrielle said, lying back on the pillows. She told Bridgette of her courtship and Bridgette watched her dreamy eyes, which still had the love light shining in them as she recalled her precious time with Finn. She knew her mother had loved Finn Sullivan deeply and as she prepared her for bed a little later she felt sadness that her life had been so harsh.

  Early the next day, before the shop was open, there was a knock on the door and, on opening it, Bridgette found a telegraph boy outside. With her heart in her mouth she ripped open the telegram with fingers that trembled.

  And then her face was flushed with joy. ‘No answer,’ she said to the boy, who stood waiting, and she shut the door on him. Ignoring the men in the bakery, she ran straight up to her mother.

  ‘Aunt Yvette is coming this afternoon,’ she cried. ‘Uncle Henri is driving down.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s only a telegram,’ Bridgette said. ‘There are no details. I’m sure she will tell us all when she gets here, but isn’t it wonderful news?’

  ‘It is, Bridgette,’ Gabrielle said. ‘It’s better than I ever dreamed of.’

  ‘I had better go and warn that man and his snivelling son that we are expecting visitors,’ Bridgette said, and added sarcastically, ‘that will brighten his day for him.’

  Gabrielle gave a wry laugh. ‘Yes, I’m sure it will.’

  Since her mother had told her that Legrand wasn’t her father, Bridgette had wanted to fling
that knowledge into his face, but she knew how vindictive and nasty he could become, and Gabrielle’s health was too precarious to risk any sort of upset.

  In the meantime, she begrudged anything she did for either of them. Ask as she might, she couldn’t get money from Legrand for food and, anxious for her mother, she had been drawing from her savings each week so that she could buy something wholesome. She resented every morsel of food that Legrand and Georges put in their mouths, and she knew that if she hadn’t her mother to consider, she would have let them go hungry.

  She set out after dinner that warm sunny day to buy something decent to make a meal for her uncle and aunt. However, she hadn’t gone far when she came upon a cluster of people speaking agitatedly.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked A man turned to her and said, ‘A man’s body found in Eperlecques Forest.’

  Bridgette’s heart was pounding as she repeated, ‘A man’s body?’

  ‘Yes,’ the man replied. ‘An ambulance has been summoned to bring him in.’

  ‘So he isn’t dead then?’ Bridgette said, hope rising in her.

  ‘The man who found him couldn’t be sure,’ another told her.

  ‘Was there only the one body?’

  ‘As far as I know,’ the first man said and added, ‘Isn’t one enough for you?’ A woman beside her remarked, ‘Are you all right, my dear? You’ve suddenly gone as white as a sheet.’

  Despite the fact that she knew her aunt and uncle would probably be at home and waiting for her, Bridgette couldn’t move until the ambulance returned. There was another man in the ambulance whom Bridgette recognised from her Resistance days. It was he who told her that it had been Charles’s body they had brought back, that he had been killed by Nazi snipers in the wood.

  ‘I thought he was dead from the first, when we came upon him, though in the dimness I couldn’t be absolutely sure,’ the man told Bridgette. ‘Gaston went off to summon an ambulance and then I tracked down those murdering German bastards and dealt with them.’

  ‘But there was only one body?’

  ‘Only one body we found,’ the man corrected. ‘Was there someone with him?’

  Bridgette nodded and because there was no longer any point in secrecy she said, ‘He was the secret agent dropped some time ago that I had been hiding. He was trying to reach British Lines. Charles said he would take him through the forest, that he knew the safer routes.’

  The man nodded. ‘Le Blockhaus has been virtually abandoned and most prisoners that survived transported back to Germany. Charles was probably trying to take the man through parts of the forest that have been fairly quiet of late. There is always a danger, though, that you will be spotted by a group of Germans patrolling the woods, like those today. The man you spoke of is probably already dead.’

  ‘There is no possibility that he could have made it?’ Bridgette asked desperately.

  The man shook his head. ‘Not a chance. For one thing, the woods are swarming with German soldiers just now, alerted by gunfire, I suppose, and if he is there they would be sure to find him. But even if he survived that, he’d never get through the forest on his own. The fact that we didn’t come upon his body signifies nothing. It was dense woodland where we found Charles and we didn’t know that there had been anyone with him, so we didn’t look for anyone else. There had certainly been plenty of shots fired, and there are lots of places in those woods for a body to lie undiscovered. I’m afraid the agent’s body is probably still lying there. And now I must go and see Charles’s family and tell them the news.’

  Devastated, Bridgette watched him go, his shoulders hunched as if to protect himself from the words he had to say, and she felt her heart plummet. The man she loved, whom she had given her heart to, was no more, though his body hadn’t been recovered and might never be. She felt despair flow all through her.

  Though she was saddened at the loss of Charles, who had worked so hard to impede and harass the Germans at every opportunity, James’s death filled her with anguish too deep to even cry out against, though she gasped aloud. People turned to look at her, but they were blurred and fuzzy and seemed a long way off and, though she could see their lips forming words, she couldn’t hear what they said. There was a roaring in her ears and she saw the pavement coming up to meet her, seconds before blackness settled all around her as she fell to the ground.

  When Bridgette came to, she was lying in her own bed. Sitting beside her on a chair was her Aunt Yvette. ‘What happened?’ she said, but even as she spoke the words she knew what had happened and the realisation that she would never ever see James Carmichael again swept over her.

  Yvette told her that their car had been brought to a halt by a crowd of people thronging the pavement and the street. ‘We got out to see what had caused the commotion,’ she said, ‘and what a shock we both got to see you lying there in a heap on the ground. The people told us a doctor had been summoned, and Henri told them to direct him to the bakery. He scooped you up, put you in the back seat of the car and brought you home.’

  ‘And has the doctor been?’

  ‘Yes,’ Yvette said. ‘He could shed no light on why you had fainted. He did say that you were very thin, but he said lots in the town are suffering from malnutrition at the moment.’

  In fact, Yvette had been in the room while the doctor examined Bridgette, as Gabrielle had expressly asked her to be, and she had been totally stunned by Bridgette’s appearance. She was more than thin, her ribs stuck right out, the skin stretched tight across them, her shoulder blades were scrawny and her arms and legs positively skinny. Yvette had lost weight herself, most people in France had, but she looked nothing like as thin as Bridgette.

  Yvette had thought she had looked a fright because, with the Parisian costume houses closed or converted to making military uniforms, and rationing and restrictions on clothes, style had to go out of the window. The lemon summer suit she wore was more than three years old but it was well cut, and though her legs were bare when once she would have worn fine silk stockings, her sandals showed off her slender feet. She’d had her old navy-blue hat revamped and adorned with a few feathers.

  To Bridgette, though, she looked magnificent and she said so. Her own dresses were threadbare and bedraggled, and had had the goodness and colour washed out of them, and her shoes were worn down nearly to the uppers.

  ‘Oh, this is just some old thing,’ Yvette said. ‘Most of my things are old now. You can get nothing decent at all, even in Paris, these days. But never mind about that. You are far too thin, Bridgette, and need a bit of feeding up, I feel. Was it just hunger that made you faint? The doctor said it could have been caused by some sort of shock.’

  ‘The doctor was right. I have had a shock,’ Bridgette said, drawing back the bedcovers. ‘But I must see if Maman is all right.’

  ‘She’s fine,’ Yvette said pushing her niece back on the bed. ‘Except that she is terribly worried about you. Henri is sitting with her now.’

  ‘Henri?’

  ‘Yes, and don’t look so surprised,’ Yvette said. ‘He is very good at things like this and if he can’t cope he’ll call us. What’s upsetting your mother at the moment is your collapse and the reason for it.’

  ‘As I said, I had a shock,’ Bridgette said.

  ‘D’you want to tell me about it?’ Yvette asked gently.

  ‘I may as well.’ Bridgette said. ‘I don’t suppose it matters now.’

  She told her aunt first about joining the Resistance after Xavier’s death. She thought Yvette might be shocked at that but she wasn’t.

  ‘How could I be?’ Yvette said when Bridgette queried this. ‘My boys did the same thing. Not at first, though Henri and I both knew that they were restless on the farm. We had thought to protect them, but there was nowhere in France to ensure their safety. One day, the soldiers came to the farm to round up the men for the labour camps in Germany. Raoul and Gerard had been given jobs around the farmhouse that day and they hid in the hayloft until the soldiers left, ta
king with them Henri’s cousin’s husband and two sons. We went on a visit when we hadn’t heard from the boys for some time and were told they had packed their bags the very next day and set off to find what they termed the Freedom Fighters.’

  ‘I’m sorry. You must be worried.’

  ‘Every day,’ Yvette said. ‘Liberation cannot come too soon for me, but now you go on with your story.’

  And so Bridgette told her aunt about her time in the Resistance, right up the point when she hid the secret agent, James Carmichael. She even told her that their fondness for each other had grown into love. In fact she explained everything, except the details of their last night.

  ‘And then today,’ she said, ‘I heard something that I hoped never to hear. She told her aunt what had transpired, not even aware when she began to cry.

  Yvette felt her own eyes prickling at the wretchedness in Bridgette’s face as she said, ‘I feel as if I am some sort of jinx. I have loved two men in my life, Xavier Laurent and then James Carmichael, and now both of them are dead and gone.’

  ‘Oh my love,’ Yvette cried as she held her niece close. ‘That isn’t anything to do with you. It’s this dreadful war.’

  ‘Well, I’ll not risk it again,’ Bridgette said fiercely. ‘This heartbreak isn’t worth it.’

  The following day, once Bridgette was properly on her feet again, she asked why Henri had driven from Paris in the black Citroën he had parked outside the bakery.

  ‘Well, the trains are not the safest route in or out of Paris at the moment,’ Yvette said. ‘The FFI keep blowing up the lines. It’s done to harass the Germans, but of course it affects everybody else as well.’

  ‘Who are the FFI?’

  ‘Resistance groups from in and around Paris under the one banner “Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur”’, Henri told her. ‘They are said to be more effective joined together in one mass.’