She’s quiet for a moment. I think, What will happen to me? How many people know, and who will they tell? I imagine how people would condemn me if they knew about my love affair. I think of the stares, the coldness—how Evelyn and Gwen and even my children would turn away from me. It’s hard to breathe. I’m worried that Evelyn will see all my guilt and my fear in my face.
She stops her knitting suddenly, holding the needles downward in front of her. Her hands are loose; the stitches start to slide. I move toward her, worried that her knitting will unravel and upset her.
“Where’s Eugene?” she says. “Where’s he gone?”
“Eugene isn’t here, Evelyn. You know that.”
“Oh.”
I press her hands around her knitting needles. Her skin is cool and papery—it doesn’t quite feel like flesh. She starts on her knitting again.
“Where’s Eugene?” she says again, after a while. “I want to kiss him good night. Somebody’s got to.” She gives me a rather flinty look.
“Evelyn. Eugene’s away fighting. He’s being very brave,” I say.
“Was the letter from him? Did you burn his letter?” she says.
“No, of course not. Why on earth would I do that?”
“He doesn’t write to us,” she says.
“No, he can’t. You know that. I’m sure he wants to, but he can’t. The letters can’t get through. Not with the Germans here. There’s a war on, Evelyn, remember.”
“A war. They say there’s a war. They always say there’s a war on,” she says. “But I don’t see any fighting around here. Rather the reverse, in fact.”
The smell of burned paper is faint, just the slightest trace on the air—yet it seems to hang around for a very long time.
Chapter 37
ONE NIGHT, WHEN we are in bed, I touch the scar on his face. It feels very soft beneath my finger, like a small child’s skin.
“So how did this happen?” I ask him.
For a moment he doesn’t speak. As though his mind is full of words, and he can’t choose the right ones. His eyes are a dense gray, like the smokes of autumn gardens.
“This was my stepfather,” he says.
I’m startled. I wasn’t expecting that. I thought the scar must be from some war injury.
“Your stepfather?”
“He hit me, and I fell on the stove,” he tells me.
“You haven’t told me about your stepfather,” I say.
Our revelations have been unequal: he knows so much more about my childhood than I know about his.
“My own father died when I was six, and my mother married again. My stepfather was a difficult man. He was a pastor. Everyone admired him, but at home he was cruel,” he says.
I try to imagine his stepfather—cool and stern and righteous.
“How terrible for you.” My voice sounds paltry, thin, as though my words are too easy, not weighty enough.
“You learn to keep quiet,” he tells me. “You learn to keep out of the way—to do what you are told to do. . . .”
“Of course you would,” I say gently. Not wanting to intrude on his thought, wanting him to go on talking.
“I have thought about this very much,” he tells me. “When you are small, you think, My stepfather is right, surely? Maybe I am a bad child. If he says it is so, it must be true. When this man is so powerful, and you are dependent on him. You have to believe he is right.”
He takes a long drag on his cigarette. I have my head on his chest. I hear how his heart speeds up as he talks, like somebody running away, though his voice is slow and full of thought.
“But then, as I grew older, I knew that wasn’t so. I came to understand that my stepfather was a cruel man.”
“He sounds very cruel,” I say.
He shifts a little, moves a few inches away from me in the bed—as though my closeness distracts him from the thing he needs to say. I lie on my side, watching him.
“There was a night when he started to hit my brother. Before that night, it had always been me that he hit. It was for the smallest thing, some water spilled on the floor. He blamed my brother, and beat him. I should have defended my brother, knocked my stepfather down. I was big enough then, I was eleven, I was big for my age, I could have fought him. But I didn’t.”
I hear the catch in his voice. I can feel how raw this is—the shame still vivid for him, still present.
“He started to beat my brother, and I did nothing. I just remember hiding under the stairs. Hearing the blows. I covered my ears with my hands, but I still heard the sound of the beating. A blow in the silence of a house is a very loud thing.”
His voice is even, measured, but I sense the distress that lies under his words.
“You see, I am not such a good man, Vivienne,” he says.
I shake my head.
“It was such a long time ago,” I tell him. “And you were only a child. Eleven is still very little. How could you possibly have stopped him?”
“I know what I was thinking then.” His voice is very quiet. When he turns toward me, I can feel his words on my skin, but I can only just hear him. “I can remember it now. While he hits him, he won’t hit me . . . That is what I thought,” he says.
“You were only a boy. What choice did you have?” I say again.
Chapter 38
DECEMBER. I HAVE lit a good fire in the living room grate, and we sit on the hearth rug and have our story by the light of the flames. Alphonse is sleeping beside us, his curled-up body moving with the rhythm of his breath, and the room has a friendly smell of warm wool, from the clothes that are drying on the fireguard. Outside, rain lashes the window; there’s a storm blowing in from the sea.
I read from the book that Angie gave us, about a ghostly funeral that winds its way down the lanes, about the old road that runs between St. Saviour’s and St. Pierre du Bois where lonely travelers have met a supernatural creature.
Millie sighs with pleasure.
“I like ghost stories, Mummy. But Blanche is really frightened of them.” She grins smugly.
Blanche’s mouth tightens briefly.
“Millie, you talk a load of nonsense,” she says.
Blanche is letting down the hem of one of her skirts. She’s growing so fast at the moment, growing out of her clothes, her limbs gazelle-like and angled, so she seems at once gawky and graceful. She holds up her needle to thread it: it has a brief dangerous glitter in the light of the fire.
“Read me another one,” says Millie.
I read about Portelet beach, where at dusk you may meet a little hunched woman all wrapped up in a shawl, who is said to be searching and searching for the son she has lost.
“Is that really really true?” says Millie.
“No, sweetheart. It’s just a story. . . .”
There’s no sound in the room but the stir of the fire and the rush of rain at the window. A log in the grate collapses inward and sends up a fountain of sparks.
Millie frowns.
“Why do people tell ghost stories? If ghosts aren’t really real?”
I wonder what to say. I could give her the obvious answer: Because the people who first told the stories believed that ghosts were real. But then Millie would say, Well, maybe they were right, Mummy—and I don’t want to mislead or frighten her.
“I think they do it because they’re afraid of the dark,” I tell her.
“I’m not afraid of the dark,” she says.
“No. But lots of people are. I was very afraid of the dark when I was little.”
I remember the time that Iris shut me in the coal shed. How I had my eyes wide open, but there was only darkness. I shudder even now, thinking of it.
“I’m not, Mummy,” she says. “I’m nearly five, and I’m not afraid of the dark.”
I move the clothes around on the fireguard, so the warmth will reach the damper parts. The cat shifts and yawns and burrows more deeply down into sleep.
I turn back to the storybook, turn the page.
>
There’s a story that tells how some island people have fairy blood—the blood of fairy invaders. These fairies came from their far-off homeland and over the sea in boats, which were craftily made, with spells woven into their sails. As the fairies drew nearer and nearer to land, the boats became smaller and smaller, until when they finally beached them, the boats were tiny as pebbles or the delicate bones of a bird. The fairies were beautiful creatures—both men and women—looking human, but lovelier; and sometimes they fell for island people, and married and set up house with them. But however happy they were on Guernsey with their loved ones, they were obliged to return eventually to their homeland, under a contract written in blood that could not be disobeyed. Sooner or later they had to leave the people they loved and sail away.
“Is that the end of the story?” says Millie.
“Yes. That’s all the book tells us.”
She frowns. The fire shuffles softly; tiny flames red as poppies dance in the dark of her eyes.
“I don’t like the ending. It’s sad. It’s not a good ending,” she says.
And I think just for a moment that yes, that was sad, and how could you live, not knowing when the one you loved would leave you. And then thinking that it’s always like that.
Chapter 39
ONE DAY I ask about his wife. I feel an intense, feverish curiosity about her.
“What is she like?” I say boldly.
“Ilse?” He hesitates. “How do you sum up a person? She keeps the house well. She holds everything together.”
Ilse must be a strong woman. I can sense that.
“She gave me safety, for a while,” he tells me.
“Yes,” I say, understanding how that would matter to him—to have a safe place to retreat to. That need is one that we share.
“And she is a good mother to Hermann. But it was a difficult birth, with many complications. She decided she would never have another child. That part of our life is over for us. It has been over for a long time.”
I feel a quick illicit happiness when he says that, because it takes a little of the guilt away from me. Then I feel guilty again, that I felt that.
“Show me,” I say. “You must have a photograph. Show me.”
He goes to the pocket of his uniform jacket, pulls out a photograph, brings it to me. It shows the three of them together.
It’s unnerving, this image of his other life, which I know nothing of. His real life. His life of family, country, duty, obligation. I am looking in on a story that has nothing to do with me.
The first thing I notice is how much younger he looks in the picture—how the years since this was taken have written on him and marked him.
“You seem so young in the picture,” I say.
He smiles a rueful smile. “You mean, I look much older now,” he says.
“I suppose I do. . . .” I reach out my hand and trace his face, the strong bones under the skin. “But I love the way you look now.”
Then I turn from him, stare at the other people in the picture.
Ilse is small, with high cheekbones and faraway eyes. Her hair is pale—maybe blond or gray—and coiled in a plait around her head. Her expression is diffident, earnest. I picture her lying awake in the nighttime, worrying, weaving the disparate strands of her family’s life together—struggling to make it all work out, adding everything up. Their son is maybe twelve in the picture, and very fair and freckled. He has his mother’s expression, eager for approval. He is wearing some kind of uniform.
Gunther watches me as I study the photograph, trying to read what I think.
“We would have very much liked to have another child,” he tells me. A little yearning creeps into his voice when he says that, and I can tell that this has been a source of sadness for both of them. “But life doesn’t always give you what you want,” he says. His eyes on me. “Well, most of the time it doesn’t.”
I turn back to the photograph, feeling the heat of his gaze.
“He looks too young to be in uniform,” I tell him.
“We have a movement for young people—the Hitlerjugend,” he says. “Hermann was very keen to join. He did get very involved. I was not entirely happy.” His face gives nothing away. “My wife was happy, but I was not happy. They go too far,” he says.
“So why did you let him join?” I ask.
“You have to be careful, you don’t want to step out of line,” he says. “And before Hermann joined the Hitlerjugend he was a wayward boy. He kept bad company. The movement gave him a sense of purpose. My wife says that is good, that life is nothing without purpose. . . . My son is in the party now.”
I feel a little shock of cold. My lover’s son is a Nazi.
“So you couldn’t stop him? You think they go too far, but you couldn’t stop him?” I say.
He shakes his head.
“It would be unwise to do that,” he says, carefully.
I think of the things we have heard—of the burning of synagogues, Jewish businesses stolen, the broken glass, the insults, the beatings on the street. I don’t say anything.
But he hears my unspoken question.
“You have to understand this, Vivienne. We couldn’t go on as we were. Germany was on her knees. The Depression was terrible for us. Our world was made of hunger and emergency decrees. We had nothing.” He’s staring into the darkness in the corners of the room, as though he can see those years spooling out again in front of him. “The habits you learn then stay with you. Ilse still has her biscuit bag—a bag for broken biscuits and crusts that hangs on her cupboard door: nothing could be wasted. Something had to change,” he says. “At first we welcomed Hitler. We felt that his arrival was like a glimmer of hope. Before Hitler, we didn’t eat: once Hitler came, we could eat. . . . But there is much that they do that seems wrong to me,” he tells me.
“So, if you could choose, you wouldn’t fight this war?”
Then I wish I hadn’t expressed it like that. I’m putting words into his mouth.
“Which of us would choose war? To have our lives torn apart like this?” There’s an edge of anger in him, that I could even ask the question. “But I would never say that anywhere else but here. You have to think always of the safety of your family,” he says.
I think what I said to him before, when he told me how he was beaten, how he should have fought his stepfather: What choice did you have? I think: What choice do we have, any of us? But I can’t answer that question.
He puts the photo away in his pocket and gets back into my bed. I can hear the wind howling around my house, like an animal, hunting, predatory—how it seeks to find its way into my house through the least little fissure or crack.
Chapter 40
FEBRUARY. JOHNNIE COMES with a gift for me, all wrapped up in brown paper. He puts it down on the kitchen table and starts to peel off the layers; inside, there’s greaseproof paper, which is red and shiny with blood.
“There you go, Auntie. A present for you.”
It’s a whole dead rabbit. Gwen has skinned it for me, so you can see the pale mauve flesh, but it still looks very rabbitlike. Once, not so long ago, I found the sight of dead animals saddening. Now, I’m just thinking how I will cook it, with some sprigs of thyme and rosemary, how rich the gravy will be, how very good it will taste.
“Your mother’s an angel,” I say. “But are you really sure you can spare it?”
“Don’t you worry, Auntie. Those rabbits breed like—well, you know what they say.”
I make him a cup of parsnip coffee. I’ve learned how to do this—grating the parsnips, roasting them just the right length of time, till they are a rich brown color like wood shavings, then infusing them. It’s better than nothing, but it always has that burned taste.
“Don’t feel you have to drink it, if you don’t like it,” I tell him.
But he drinks it rapidly.
The clear white light of early spring spills all over my room—that searching light that shows up the dirt where you hav
en’t cleaned for a while, all the cobwebs and dustballs you missed in the dull veiled days of winter; and it falls all over Johnnie, his vividness, his restless hands, his eager nut-brown eyes. I watch him drinking his coffee and think how fond I am of him.
“So what have you been up to, Johnnie? Still painting V-signs?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer at once. In the silence between us, I sense something shifting, rearranging itself.
His throat moves as he swallows.
“I wanted to tell you, Auntie. We’ve got a new thing going, me and Piers Falla,” he says.
But he doesn’t sound very buoyant, and he isn’t meeting my eye.
“He was going to come here, Piers was,” Johnnie tells me.
There’s something halting in his voice. I don’t understand what he means. I can’t imagine why Piers would want to come to Le Colombier.
“I told him not to,” he says.
Alphonse slinks into the kitchen, lured by the smell of raw meat. He circles the table, mewing loudly, then crouches, poised to leap up. I grab him, put him in the hall, slam the door on him. He scratches at the door, and wails: the sound is unnerving, half-human, like some uncanny hybrid thing.
“You see, the point is, Auntie . . .”
Johnnie isn’t looking at me. He puts out one hand in a small helpless gesture, and knocks his coffee cup over. The dark sludgy liquid left at the bottom spills out. He straightens the cup, but he doesn’t notice the spill.
I know I should get a wet cloth, but my legs are suddenly shaky and I don’t trust them to work.
“The thing is . . .” His gaze slides past me. “The thing is . . . there are women on Guernsey who are doing what they shouldn’t. Being a little too friendly. Letting the side down. You know what I mean.”
He flushes, all over his face and his neck, a flush as bright as strawberries.
My heart starts pounding. I wonder if he can see its pounding through my blouse.
“I’m sure there are.” My voice is casual, light, as though this is nothing to me. “Men and women together—you know how it is.”
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