When I Was Young

by Mary Fitzgerald

  I cast my mind about for something to say which would soften M. Hubert’s attack, endorsements of the kindness of all members of this household, how I loved being here and what had happened to Mathilde must have been to do with the men she entertained. In the end I said none of those things. I simply repeated my statement.

  “Ask me anything you like, M. Hubert.”

  “Good,” said M. Hubert. He nodded his head, then looking up at Étienne, added meanly, “I can arrange for you to be arrested now, if you prefer.”

  Grandmère, who had sat quietly throughout the exchange, now stood up. “I can answer questions too,” she growled, staring at M. Hubert as though he was something deeply unpleasant. “What do you want to know?”

  “And me,” Lisette joined the clamour and suddenly Étienne burst out laughing and relaxed.

  We did go to the police station; Étienne and I were driven away in the police car and were put in separate rooms to wait. I thought about my parents while I sat on a wooden chair next to an old varnished table. Mother had been in hospital for two weeks now, not getting any better it would appear and I wondered, yet again, what was the matter with her. Had she been ill when I left? I thought back to that brief peck on my cheek she’d given me at the station and tried to picture her face, hollow cheeked in the cold, unforgiving station lights. Was it different? Oh God. Maybe it was but I’d been too excited to notice. How could I have been so blind?

  Then Dada. Here, I almost cried. He’d endured four unspeakable years in a prisoner of war camp, torture, starvation, the most utter privation and now, as far as he was concerned he was imprisoned again. I could imagine him leaning against a wall in the asylum, watching nurses, doctors and other patients walking about and all the time never uttering a word.

  I’d heard our doctor once telling Mother that the reason Dada didn’t speak was that he’d trained himself not to when he was being tortured by the guards and now it had somehow become imprinted on his brain. “Or at least,” our GP had said, helplessly, “something like that. The psychiatrists aren’t entirely sure and there is no treatment.”

  Well, I thought, pulling myself together, if he could resist his captors, so can I.

  M. Hubert got very little out of me. I gave him a brief outline of my holiday and how my parents were ill and Étienne had let me stay longer. “He has been very kind,” I added. “So have all the family.”

  “Except Mathilde Martin, eh?”

  I let that pass.

  “The boy, Jean Paul, where is he?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  M. Hubert took out a packet of cigarettes, Gitanes, the same as the man on the train and I thought about Miss Baxter and Janet and Margaret. They’d all be back in England now and people would be talking about me and why I wasn’t back.

  “Surely, Miss Gill, he must have said something to you. The boy. Same age as you, you got close, maybe?” The detective lit one of the cigarettes and took a long pull at it before breathing smoke out into small room. I shook my head then made a great play of heavy coughing, wafting my hand in front of my face and appearing generally disconcerted. He flushed and dropping the cigarette on the floor, ground it out with his shoe.

  “So you don’t know where he went?”

  I cleared my throat extravagantly before choking out an answer. “No. No idea.”

  He flicked through the notebook where he’d written my answers to his previous questions but he didn’t seem to know what to ask next. He had never asked if I needed a translator and I thought that if he started trying to winkle out details that I wanted to keep to myself, that would be my escape. I could pretend that I didn’t understand. While I waited, I looked at the little square window out of which I could see nothing because night had fallen and drummed my fingers on the table. I felt that I had the measure of this man and that nothing he could do or say would bother me.

  I was still drumming when M. Hubert spoke again. “Do you know how Madame Martin died?”

  “No.” I frowned and gazed beyond him to the shiny green painted walls of the small room while I thought about it. She’d been murdered, he’d said. Did that mean someone had deliberately pushed her into the river? The wooden railing on the bridge was cracked. Was she pushed against it?

  When I looked back he was staring at me. “You’ve thought of something?” he said, eagerly. “Something you want to tell me.”

  “No,” I shrugged, trying to sound girlish and ignorant. “Nothing. What could there possibly be?” Maybe I was too flippant because his eagerness was wiped off his face in an instant.

  “Well, I’ll tell you, girl.” He angrily slammed his hand onto the table, making me jump and he leant forward so that his face was only inches away from mine. “Madame Martin did not drown, she was already dead before she entered the water. Her neck was not broken in an accident but deliberately and almost certainly by someone you know!” My shock must have been evident because M. Hubert’s eyes glittered and he smiled, showing small yellowy teeth.

  “She was murdered, Miss Gill.” The next thing he said filled me with horror. “It will be the guillotine for the murderer, Miss Gill. The guillotine.”

  We were taken back to the farm in the back of a police car. It seems that M. Hubert had no proof that either Étienne or I had any involvement in Mathilde’s death and had to let us go. “But I’m not finished with you,” he’d shouted as we walked out of the police station. “I’ll find something. Just you see.”

  Étienne ignored him and turned to me. “Are you alright?” he asked, taking my arm. He looked exhausted and I noticed that the collar of his shirt was torn and the top two buttons missing. There was a red mark on his face just below his left eye.

  “You’ve been hit,” I said anxiously and forgetting that we were still in full view of M. Hubert, I reached up my hand and touched his cheek.

  “It’s nothing,” said Étienne and helped me into the back of the police car. I turned round as we swung away and saw through the narrow back window the detective watching us with a calculating frown on his face.

  We hardly spoke on the drive home but sat, shoulders touching, facing away from each other, watching the trees on the sides of the road looming out of the shadows. I thought about Mathilde being murdered and I know Étienne was thinking about it too. M. Hubert had said that she’d been killed by someone I knew and that could only be a member of the family, couldn’t it? A shiver ran through me and Étienne must have felt it because he took my hand and held it gently in his. That calmed me but even so, I refused to think about the guillotine. The police driver asked directions once and was given them but that was all. I think we were too shocked or too exhausted to speak. That would come later.

  Grandmère was waiting for us in the yard. She’d heard the car turning through the gateway and had come out. Holding onto her hand was Lisette.

  “The child wouldn’t go to bed,” she said gruffly after kissing me on both cheeks and putting a hand on Étienne’s shoulder. “I’ve soup and bread in the kitchen, come along now.”

  So the four of us sat around the kitchen table, smiling at each other in relief and enjoying the hot soup and bread. Lisette sat beside me, her little hand on my arm, her eyelids drooping sleepily. She’d wrapped her arms about my waist when I got out of the police car and wouldn’t let me go until I made her sit in a chair and take a piece of bread.

  “Oh, Eleanor,” she’d breathed. “I thought you’d never come back.”

  “Silly girl,” I smiled and kissed her cool cheek. “I’m here now.”

  Grandmère got up and went into the pantry. I looked across to Étienne. He was clutching a glass of wine in front of him but he wasn’t drinking it. He had put his head under the tap in the sink when we went into the kitchen, letting the cold water soothe his swelling cheek. Now he sat with his damp hair black and curling on his collar and his half open shirt sticking to his chest.

  “Did Hubert touch you?” he muttered, one eye on Lisette.


  “No,” I said. “I hated him interrogating me but he kept his distance.”

  “Good,” he nodded and swirled the wine around in his glass but still didn’t drink it.

  “Look,” Grandmère came back with a plate of sweet pastries. “I made these while I was waiting. Gave me something to do.”

  “Lovely,” I said but I hesitated. “I’m sorry, Grandmère. I can’t eat any more tonight.”

  She looked at Étienne but he shook his head and when she turned to Lisette she smiled and shook her head. “The child’s asleep. I’ll take her up to bed.”

  “Sit Maman. I’ll take her.” Étienne got up and gathering Lisette gently into his arms, carried her out of the kitchen.

  “Well,” said Grandmère. “That’s the first time he’s…” She started clearing the table and I got up to help her.

  “No, Eleanor. Let me do it. You must go to bed.”

  I nodded and turned towards the door leading up to my room. “Was it too terrible?” she asked, not properly looking at me.

  “No,” I replied, softly. “Don’t worry.”

  “Sweet child,” she said, more to herself, as I climbed to back stairs to the blessed comfort of my room.

  Chapter 19

  In the days that followed we were mostly left on our own. The farm workers came and went, of course and the jobs that we all did, me included for I felt now that I was truly a part of the life at Riverain, were done as usual.

  Grandmère was called into the police station once to give a statement but wasn’t there very long. “Do you want me to come with you?” asked Étienne when the police car came for her.

  “No. I’m alright by myself,” she said. “Carry on with your work and you, Eleanor, can dig up a few potatoes and carrots. I’ll call in at the butcher’s while I’m in town, I’m sure Albert Charpentier won’t mind waiting for me.” She fixed the young local policeman with her stern gaze.

  “No, Madame,” he said hastily and she nodded and got into the back of the car.

  We were in the vineyard when she came back, Étienne, Lisette and me, on a hot morning where the sky was as blue as can be and there wasn’t a breath of air. Even the birds in the trees down by the river were quiet, almost exhausted, I imagined, by the long days of baking weather. In the week since Mathilde and Jean Paul had gone the heat had been relentless and Étienne had spent hours pumping water through the rows of vines so as to make sure that the grapes plumped up and the harvest would be good.

  “After the harvest, we’ll start new planting,” he said, “over there.” He pointed to a sloping pasture adjacent to the vineyard where beef cattle flicked their tails at buzzing insects and grazed on tinder dry grass. “I’ll keep the dairy cows on the water meadows but all of this is going back to the grape.” He waved his hand over the hillside and smiled. He looked happier than I’d ever seen him.

  This morning, while Grandmère was at the police station, Étienne and I were pruning away some of the leaves shading the ripening bunches of grapes and tying straggling tendrils back onto the wires. He’d shown me what to do and although it was fiddly work, I enjoyed it. “Cut back some of the lower growth as well,” he’d said guiding my hand to where I was to cut. “We have to keep the insects away.” His hand was hot on mine and his fingers rough where they closed over my fist holding the little knife he’d given me and forced me to slice through a small green branch. “There, that’s how. Can you do that?”

  “Yes,” I nodded, a little breathlessly and cut through another branch.

  “Very good. We’ll make a grower of you yet.” Then he’d grinned while my cheeks glowed and I wiped away the sheen of sweat that had gathered on my face. I wore a big straw hat that Grandmère had found in one of the unused bedrooms. “Oh, I’d forgotten this,” she’d said. “This was my garden hat before the war. You have it now.”

  Étienne stood beside me and clipped away excess leaves at the top of the vine. “The canopy of each bush must be thinned to allow air to circulate,” he grunted as leaves dropped down, some on my head. “In five or six weeks we’ll be harvesting, so I want as much sunlight on the grapes as possible. It makes them sweeter.”

  “Mm,” I grunted, tossing my head so the fallen leaves dropped from my hat. Étienne was so close that I could smell him, sweaty, yes but more than that. It wasn’t the sour, small room stench that M. Hubert gave off nor the dry, cold almost ghostly odour that surrounded Dada. To me, it was earthy, outdoors, exciting. He smelled like a man.

  “There’s a car coming.” Lisette, who’d been sitting on the dusty ground beneath the vines, stood up and looked down the slope towards the bridge. “Perhaps it’s Grandmère coming home. I do hope so.”

  She had been shuffling on her bottom along the rows as Étienne and I worked, gathering the cuttings into piles so it would be easier for us to collect and burn. In the last week she’d hardly let me out of her sight but she had been a good girl and Grandmère had given her little chores to do, putting out scraps for the cats who lived in the barn and tying herbs into bunches so that they could be hung up to dry. Now she was more a part of the family than she’d ever been before.

  I’d started to teach her to read. Madame d’Amboise had given her a brightly coloured story book with pictures of fairies and goblins, which she loved. I read the story to her every evening and then started picking out the letters and making her say them after me. Étienne watched us as we sat at the kitchen table repeating the A B C and laughed.

  “I think I learned to read exactly like that,” he said. “But not from a book. I’m pretty sure it was the newspaper that Maman used as instruction. My first readings were all about politics and wars, not to mention births, marriages and deaths.”

  I smiled because his story sounded so familiar. Feed invoices and vet’s bills were what I started with, on my own, when we went to the farm. Suddenly an image came into my mind of a pop-up alphabet book and how overjoyed I’d been when Mother put it into my hands. How could I have forgotten that? Her getting something especially for me. It would have been at the beginning of the war and Dada had just been posted to the Far East. We lived in a little house in the town and although Mother was sad that Dada had gone away she was happy with me. Then we went to the farm and she changed.

  I was still thinking about it when Étienne spoke again. He was leaning back in his chair staring out of the kitchen door to where the pots of geraniums wilted in the late afternoon sun. I mentally noted that I would water them when the sun had gone down. “D’you know,” he said slowly, “I don’t think my father could read, at least, not well.” He shook his head. “How odd. I never thought of that before.”

  The book that Luc had given me was on the table beside Lisette’s fairy book and I wondered if those two volumes had started him thinking. “Well,” I said, “that won’t be a problem with this little one. She’s picking it up quickly.”

  “Very good.” He got up and patted the child on her shiny ash brown hair. “School for you next month, young lady.”

  But now she was skipping down between the vines to greet Grandmère on her return from the police station. Étienne and I followed more slowly, strolling between the green leaves and letting the heady scent of ripening grapes bathe us. Walking through the undergrowth on the way to the bridge, Étienne stopped and took my arm, pulling me round to face him.

  “Are you happy again, Eleanor? Like you were before?” He took off his cap and used it to wipe the sweat from his brow. “I know you wanted to leave after what Jean Paul did to you and that was completely understandable. But now, even with,” he shrugged, “this business with Mathilde, have you forgiven us? Forgiven me.”

  Of course I had, I would have forgiven Étienne anything. Maybe I was enchanted, under a spell cast by this exquisite place because it seemed that after a few hours, each unpleasant event stealthily passed me by and dissolved in the morning mist. Attempted rape? It wasn’t really all that bad, was it? After all Jean Paul didn’t hurt me, much. The few bruises I h
ad were fading and my memory of the events had become confused and overlaid with Mathilde’s death. And even that. Murder? After the first shock, the fact that Mathilde had been deliberately killed was only another difference, cultural or perhaps even inevitable and the gravity of it seemed to float away as she had nearly done. It was something that didn’t really matter.

  No, I was content, loving every day and revelling in being part of what had become a happy family. The only cloud on the horizon was the fact that I would soon have to go home and I mentally winced as I remembered that I had suggested to M. Castres how it could be organised. But as the days passed and I had no word from him, even thoughts of ever going back were pushed to the furthest reaches of my mind.

  I put my hand on Étienne’s. “There’s nothing to forgive,” I breathed. “And yes, I am happy, happier than I have ever been. This place is heaven.”

  “Then stay with us,” his voice had dropped to a murmur. He bent his head down closer to mine so I could see the tracery of white lines around his eyes where he had crinkled up his face against the sun. His eyes were a deep liquid brown and looking into them I felt as though I was drowning. I barely heard what he whispered next.“Stay with me.”

  I think he would have kissed me then but Lisette came running through the undergrowth. “Papa! Eleanor! Grandmère is back and she’s brought the bad man with her.”

  Grandmère was in the yard, standing beside the police car. She looked hot and a little flustered, an iron grey strand of her hair had come away from her tight bun but otherwise she wasn’t too bad. I went straight to her and took the bag of groceries from her. “Are you alright?” I asked.