by Chloe Mayer
So that morning, when I came into the glade, I was excited that Hansel was nowhere to be seen. Time to engage in a little reconnaissance mission. I ran back into the orchard, and approached the wood cabin on my belly, shuffling forward with my elbows. I didn’t want to be spotted on enemy radar.
When I reached the back wall, my fingers curled into my palm to create my special spy telescope and I stood up to position it against the hole. It made it harder to see, so I put it away and put my naked eye before the knot. My eyelashes fluttered against the wood like butterfly wings, and the light pressure on them from the wall felt ticklish.
They were standing so close.
I didn’t know why they were both standing so unnaturally close together. They weren’t talking. I didn’t know what they were doing, what they were waiting for.
And then he kissed her.
And it was so quiet, even though their mouths were moving.
I had never seen a man kiss a woman like that. I couldn’t remember ever seeing Daddy kiss Mother that way, although I had seen pecks on the cheek between them, and between people in train stations.
After she ran away, I walked the long way around so I could approach the glade from a different point, a safer angle.
I called out so he knew I would be with him soon.
(I’m coming … Are you ready?)
15
He kissed her rosy lips and played with her long hair, and took her in his arms, so that her heart began to dream of human happiness …
From The Little Mermaid
When her hair was being combed, Gerda began to forget her playmate Kai more and more.
From The Snow Queen
It happened again. In the end.
She went back.
She had thought of little else since. A few days after the kiss – a kiss, was that all it was? – a sudden summer rain arrived to puncture the humidity. She had been restless all day and in boredom went to her bedroom to try to nap.
She managed to sleep for a couple of hours and when she woke up it was after four o’clock.
In the late-afternoon light, sharp from the whitish-grey sky, she watched fat droplets of rain sliding down the windowpane. They were reflected as shadow raindrops on her bedcovers.
She lifted her bare arm and twisted her wrist this way and that to watch the shadows of water appear to slide over the smooth skin there. He’d stroked her wrist.
She enjoyed watching the shadows play across her skin, and the movement made it look as though the shadow water was dripping down her arm. Her skin looked so white compared to the reflected dark grey of the raindrops. She felt as though she was in a film at the cinema; life reduced to black, white and grey. She lazily watched the fake display of water on her exposed arm and imagined him licking the raindrops from her skin.
She furiously leapt up from her bed, closed the curtains, pulled on her dressing gown and marched out of her room, but jumped as she almost ran into the boy who had been loitering on the landing by her open bedroom door. She skirted him and went downstairs into the kitchen where she put the kettle on the hob to boil.
But there were only so many times she could put it out of her mind. Was he thinking of it too?
She had to go back; it would look strange to Dawson if she suddenly went elsewhere after telling him of her plan to stock up her supply of wood before winter.
And somehow, she had decided she didn’t want that kiss to be all there was. She had been so lonely for so long.
She pulled back a chair and smoked a cigarette from the packet lying on the table as she waited for the kettle to screech.
She was thinking, thinking.
The boy had trailed her downstairs and started scratching around to pull a meal together.
He fried eggs and bread together in a pan and she thanked him as he put a plate in front of her. She ate distractedly, then led him upstairs for his story. It was very early still, she supposed, probably only a little after five o’clock, but an early night would be good for everyone.
Her mind was made up; after the child went out to play in the morning, she would return to the orchard in the woods.
The next day, she bathed and dressed with care. It was still too early, so she gazed out of the window in the sitting room, smoking a cigarette to kill some time. It was here she’d watched as he and the first PoWs came into Bambury.
Yesterday’s summer storm seemed as though it were about to return to battle with the season’s stickiness. The clouds in the sky were rumbling like a stomach, but not because they were empty – they were full of thunder.
Despite this, it wasn’t dark. A dirty yellow light was somehow penetrating through the clouds, filtering through the net curtains, so that the day itself seemed jaundiced. She stubbed out her cigarette and began to pace the room. The lace doilies on the dresser had taken on an unpleasant, sickly hue, like the wallpaper in her parents’ house, stained from her father’s cigars. The sky was swollen; a boil that needed to be lanced. The earth seemed expectant. She felt jittery, could feel the energy in the air. She wanted lightning to burst the storm open. She wanted the rain to come now. It would be a relief. She couldn’t bear the waiting of it.
Annabel was still pacing a circle. She was a caged animal. She understood the electric charge in the air – her own body crackled with it.
She had never felt so trapped or so alive.
Even during her courting days with Reggie, she had never felt like this. This was different. This must be love. She stopped pacing. Of course! She was desperately in love with him.
Really, the impending thunderstorm meant that she should stay inside, but they had gone too far now and she had to go. She needed to go. It was all she could do to stop herself from charging through the front door and tearing down the street to find him.
Annabel noticed the boy watching her from the doorway. He drove her mad with his constant creeping. She told him to go out and play because she had lots of chores to do. If he seemed surprised to be sent out when a storm was brewing, he didn’t show it.
She managed to wait until ten o’clock.
Then she made some tea and put it into a flask which she threw into her handbag. She had already given him the other flask from this matching set. Hurriedly, she pulled on her mac, put on a little lipstick at the mirror in the hallway – not too much, she didn’t want it smeared across her cheeks or chin when he kissed her – and she pulled the front door shut behind her. Her heels clipped on the pavement like she was a trotting horse, but she couldn’t bear to slow down. She hoped the rain held off until she was there; she had an umbrella but didn’t want the humidity frizzing her hair and causing the curls to drop out.
She had agonised over what to wear – too dressy and she would look silly standing in the rural mess of the orchard – but too drab and she would feel dowdy and plain. She had settled on a summer dress that was perhaps a little light given the ominous sky, but wasn’t inappropriate because it was now July after all. The colours were bright daubs of dye and she hoped it would make him think of her as a flower – perhaps he would call her his English rose – or maybe a butterfly. She was exhilarated in a fraught sort of way.
Thunder could bellow and lightning could split the sky wide open and the rain could lash down – but they would be safe under the little wooden roof. The friendly storm would keep customers and Dawson away, and the sweet noise would muffle their sounds.
And she knew he would love her today. There, in the shed, on the rough wooden boards, while soldiers of garden equipment stood sentinel and with the smell of the earth and growing things around them.
Later, he stroked her hair, running his fingers through the strands like a comb. They were naked and their legs were still entwined.
He propped himself up on one arm, cupping his head in his palm as he looked down at her.
She asked him questions about his life in Germany, before the war. He told her he didn’t have a sweetheart, which was what she really wanted to know. He
began to play with the silver locket around her neck and the tiny chain tickled her throat as he ran the charm along the links. She told him the heart was empty – no photographs or hair or keepsakes inside – it was just a gift from her parents years ago. She showed him her name and birthday engraved on the back; she didn’t want him to think it was from her husband.
He asked her questions, too. Away from her house, and the boy, and memories of Reggie, she found herself able to view her life quite objectively. She was honest. Or mostly honest. She told him she had been unhappy for a long time, and had struggled after the boy was born.
She didn’t mention the horror of the first year, the whispered threats of the asylum that finally forced her to realise she had to get up and pretend to be a functioning woman. But she told him the story of the time she had once almost run away.
‘Once upon a time,’ she said, with a little laugh and a shrug. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Really? You were going to run away?’
‘Well, I didn’t get very far.’
‘What happened?’
She sat up to fumble for a cigarette in her handbag and lit it for them to share. They listened to the sound of the summer rain battering the little shed. It made the temperature pleasantly cool after the fierce heat of their bodies, cool enough to cuddle, and she lay back down, her head in the crook of his shoulder as they smoked.
‘The boy was about three, I suppose. It was spring, before the war started. And I just woke up that day and wanted to go away. So a bit later, that morning, when my husband had left for work, I just thought … I’d go.’
She flipped over onto her stomach so she could see his face.
‘Is that … Do you think that’s just absolutely … terrible?’
‘No, no,’ he said and lifted up a little to kiss her. ‘I think it was actually very brave to leave.’
She gave a slight nod, unable to speak for a moment. He really understood.
‘I walked to the end of the road,’ she said with a sudden hoarse laugh. ‘And that was as far as I got!’
She took the cigarette from him and took a deep drag.
‘It was my only serious attempt to run away, but I didn’t get any further than the end of the lane that led away from Bambury. Isn’t that funny? I just stood there, for quite some time actually, wondering whether to walk for another twenty minutes or so until I got to the station. It was the train I’d been thinking of when I woke up, you see. I’d woken with an almost unbearable desire to get on a train.’
He nodded up at her and she held the cigarette to his lips, making them both smile as she helped him smoke.
‘I wanted to sit on that train for hours,’ she said, ‘seeing all the fields and towns blurring as they sped past. The images beyond the window would just swim by as though I were underwater. It was such a strong fantasy; can you imagine that? The urge took me by complete surprise because I’d been fine for a couple of years by that point.’
She fell silent as she remembered trying to decide what to do on that street corner. Trying to decide whether to go back to her crafted façade or whether to escape.
But of course, reality had leached into her dream as she stood on the pavement. Besides a few shillings in her purse, she had nothing.
‘I didn’t know where to go,’ she said. ‘The train’s destination was never actually part of the fantasy. I hadn’t taken any clothes with me and I don’t know how to type or do anything like that so a job was out of the question. No; I realised I would have to turn back. And I thought, “Oh! This can’t have been a serious attempt to run away after all.” But still, I lingered.’
She gave another almost-laugh as she sat all the way up and wrapped her arms around her knees, which she pulled tight to her chest.
‘It was funny really. I was probably standing on that corner for, goodness, fifteen minutes or so! Still as a statue. Cherry blossom had fallen all over me while I stood there.
‘I must have looked a picture – you know, a bit strange – because an old lady stopped to ask me if I was all right! I didn’t know her, luckily, and I mumbled a silly excuse about waiting for a bus and thanked her for pointing out there was no bus stop on that stretch of road – I’d have to walk a bit further down.
‘Then I turned around and walked home. Reggie was at the bank so no one knew what I’d nearly done.’
Hans sat up and wrapped his arms around her. She leaned back into his chest, so she was enclosed by him. She was still curled up in her tight little ball.
‘Poor Annie …’
She had brushed the fallen petals from her hair and clothes as she made her way home down the tree-lined lane that warm spring day. But she’d hesitated, just for a moment, before lifting her key to the lock.
The child would still be upstairs, where she’d left him.
‘When I closed the front door behind me, I perched on the step at the foot of the stairs for a while, just, you know, sort of willing myself into action. Eventually, I went up and opened the door of the nursery.’
She’d kept her hand on the cool, brass doorknob, which was greasy from the sweat of other people’s hands. Reggie’s mainly, she’d supposed, and both their mothers’.
‘The child was in his cot – he was much too big for a cot, really, but we hadn’t got around to … Anyway, he was standing up, clinging to the wooden bars like an animal. He stared at me very solemnly, but didn’t make a sound. The two of us just looked at each other across the room. “I ran away today,” I told him.’
Annabel swivelled round now, and wrapped her arms around Hans’s neck so she could cling on there, and he took the cigarette from her fingers and finished it, smoking over the top of her head.
The following Sunday, a little over a week since she and Hans had become lovers, her parents came up for tea. It was her father’s birthday.
Annabel had made some sandwiches and her mother brought her sugar rations so they could pool them to bake a cake, but something wasn’t right with it. The sponge was flat and dense but they all ate it anyway and pretended to enjoy it so as not to waste the sugar, although her father wasn’t particularly successful at hiding his disappointment.
They were sitting around the wrought-iron table in the back garden, occasionally batting at a wasp or insect hovering over the crumbs. The summer storms from the week before had long since been beaten back by the sun, and the smell of hot earth rose up from the ground. Annabel was enjoying the warm prickly feeling on her bare arms as her flesh started to cook. Her skin had already taken on a honeyed hue from sitting outside in the orchard with Hans, chatting to him or just watching him while he worked.
After tea and cake, and a half-hearted attempt to sing Happy Birthday which trailed off because it felt so silly with just three adults and a child in the garden, Annabel told the boy to go and play in the woods. But he said he was too hot and lay down on the lawn in the shade and closed his eyes.
‘Hasn’t he got any friends in the street to play with?’ her mother asked in a low voice.
‘Oh, not today.’
‘But … usually then?’
‘Yes. Usually,’ Annabel said.
‘I had too many chums to count at that age,’ her father told them both. The thought seemed to cheer him up and he pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and set about tying a knot into each corner so he could wear it as a hat to protect his bald head from the glare of the sun.
Annabel suppressed a sigh. He was going to reminisce about his boyhood.
‘What fun we’d have. Why, my parents wouldn’t see me until supper time. Got into some trouble, mind you.’ He chuckled. ‘Best years of my life.’
‘Do you think it’s safe, though?’ Elizabeth broke in. Annabel suspected she was trying to avert an anecdote.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, supposing there’s an air-raid siren and he doesn’t hear it all the way out there? And I don’t like how close you are to all those Germans.’
Annabel sm
iled openly at this, and secretly inside.
‘This isn’t London, Mother. And we’re not in a “Bomb Alley” town or on the coast. I’ve hardly even been in the shelter since Reggie built it!’
They all looked at the eyesore at the end of the garden, a messy patchwork of corrugated iron and turf.
‘And as for the Germans …’ her words drifted away and she felt a flush beginning to bloom on her cheeks that felt like glowing, scarlet roses. She felt a strange, secret pleasure to be almost speaking about her lover openly.
‘Yes?’
‘Well, some of the ones in the village are really very nice. They’re safe enough, aren’t they?’
‘Safe?!’ her father bellowed.
‘You know what I mean. They have to be accounted for all the time. They can’t really roam freely or anything. I think it’s quite secure. And besides,’ she had remembered the grocer’s words, ‘where would they go, anyway? They’re better off here. Not to mention they’re watched over by a colonel.’
Her pleasure was quite gone now. She felt irritable and defensive. She busied herself clearing the table – standing up to pile plates and cups on the tray. Worse than her anger was the shame. For the first time she seriously considered what her parents, in fact, what anybody would think of her if they knew her secret.
Affairs were sinful, dirty, and wicked. But for a woman – a mother – to have an affair with a prisoner, a German soldier, in a sordid little shed? It was obscene, and she was disgusting. Sweaty bodies writhing together like snakes against the earthy floor amongst spades and ploughs while his kind slaughtered young British men, some still in their teens. She closed her eyes. People would think she was depraved. They’d call her a traitor.
