I remember what Gunther had said—about the carnage there, about the immensity of Russia and her armies; about Stalingrad, which they called the mass grave of the Wehrmacht; about the cold, everything turned to ice—the lubricant in the tanks and guns, the lifeblood of men.
I swallow hard.
“Oh. When are you going?”
We’re both very cautious, very formal.
“We leave on Monday,” he says.
“So soon?” I say.
“Yes, so soon. But whenever it was, it would be too soon for us.”
“Thank you for telling me,” I say.
I expect him to go then, but he doesn’t. I see his throat move as he swallows.
“There is something else that I think I should tell you.” He is speaking so carefully. I know he has thought deeply about whether to say this to me. “Gunther has heard that his son has been killed. His son, Hermann.”
The world tilts. The words hang in the air, like sharpened blades. If I put out my hand they will cut me.
He watches me. He nods slightly.
“I thought as much,” he says. “I thought he hadn’t told you. Gunther is a private person. He keeps many things inside himself. . . .”
Neither of us says anything for a moment. In the silence between us, I hear a far-off torrent, the rush of water that comes with the turn of the tide. Soon it will overwhelm me.
“When?” My voice is distant, muffled. “When did he hear this?”
But even as I ask the question, I know what Max will say.
“It was six weeks ago. It was about the same time that there was that unfortunate incident in your orchard—the shooting of the escaped prisoner. I thought you should know,” he tells me.
“Yes. Thank you,” I say.
Chapter 81
ON MONDAY MORNING, after I’ve taken Millie up to school, I set about cleaning the house for the funeral tea.
It’s strange to be alone here. This hasn’t happened for an age—not since Evelyn stopped going out. There’s a different quality of stillness to a house that’s empty—a sense of release, a flat calm quiet, almost as though the house itself is letting out its breath. There’s no sound but the rasp of Alphonse’s tongue on his fur, as he sits on the windowsill in a circle of thin gilded sun. The weekend has been busy, with Blanche and Millie distraught about their grandmother’s death, with the funeral to organize. But now, in the silent house, I feel an unexpected clarity, as if a sound in my head, a constant insect-buzzing, like static on a wireless, has been suddenly switched off.
In the unfamiliar stillness, there’s one thought at the front of my mind. It’s Monday and Gunther is leaving. And, thinking that, I return again to the terrible thing Max told me—that Gunther’s son had been killed. The shiny ribbon of the past, which had seemed so neatly tied up, unknots and spools out in front of me. My mind is full of questions. Did I read everything wrong? Was that why he seemed so remote, so withdrawn, when I saw him that evening after Kirill had been shot? What if it wasn’t Gunther who betrayed us? What if he had nothing at all to do with the death of Kirill? What if I pushed him away for nothing?
There are no answers to these questions.
There’s a gray bloom of dust on the books in the bookcase, where I rarely clean. I pull out a handful of books to dust them, and something drifts to the floor, a piece of thick folded paper. I pick it up, open it, smooth out the creases. It’s the drawing Gunther made of me, that first evening we spent together: I’d tucked it in between the books where nobody would see.
I stare at it—it’s so accurate, not very flattering really, yet revealing something, showing me as I am. I remember how we looked at the drawing together—how, as we looked, he ran his finger down the curve of my cheek. My body is suddenly weak. I sit down abruptly on the sofa; my hand goes limp and the paper falls to the floor. Everything seems illuminated—so simple, so dazzlingly clear. I have to say good-bye to him; I have to hold him once more. Why didn’t I see that? Why has it taken so long to understand? Suddenly, this is the only thing in my entire world that matters.
I pull off my apron, rush out the door, race around to Les Vinaires. I notice that the black Bentley that Gunther uses is gone. I knock at the door. It hurts to breathe.
A thickset man with hooded eyes answers the door. I don’t recognize him.
“I’m looking for Captain Lehmann,” I say.
He shakes his head.
“They have gone already,” he says.
“To St. Peter Port?”
It’s as though a heavy boulder is pressing into my chest. I could never get to town in time—it takes an age to cycle there.
He shakes his head.
“Not to the port. To the airfield.”
I feel a surge of joy. With this news, he has handed me a gift: the airfield is easy to get to, just up the hill and along the main road.
“Thank you,” I say. “Thank you so much.”
He frowns slightly, perplexed by my excessive gratitude.
I run to get my bicycle. I’m full of a frenzied energy. I seem to ride so effortlessly up the hill—though I have to hold tight, my hands are damp and slippery, and slide around on the handlebars as though they aren’t really mine.
The airport is full of commotion and shouting and purpose, German soldiers everywhere, and lorries, motorbikes, jeeps—all the teeming, solemn, elaborate apparatus of war that I am so ignorant of. A plane takes off as I approach, the roar of it filling the world, making my ears thrum. Some great movement of troops is happening. Something shrivels inside me. I was so intent on getting here, I hadn’t thought through what I’d do—just had this hope, this certainty, that I’d somehow find him, that this was meant to happen.
As I cycle up the approach road, I notice the black Bentley, parked with some other civilian cars on the curb. My heart lifts. But there is nobody in it.
I jump off my bicycle, leave it lying at the side of the road. Out of nowhere, a wave of nausea breaks over me. My body convulses; I retch up a little clear bile. It must be because of all the stress of the day, the exertion of the ride here. I wipe my face. I’m embarrassed, I hope that nobody saw. But I feel lighter, clearer, now.
Three soldiers are standing near me, smoking; they’re casual, talking, laughing. They quiet as I approach.
“Excuse me. I’m looking for someone, I wonder if you could help,” I say.
They shake their heads, make small helpless gestures, shrugging—that universal language that says that you don’t understand.
“I’m looking for Captain Lehmann. It’s important,” I say.
Perhaps they will at least recognize his name. But they glance briefly at one another, then shake their heads again. As I turn away, one of them murmurs something in German, staring at me: the other men laugh loudly. I feel my face go hot.
I walk boldly up to the barrier that controls traffic into the airport. A soldier standing there stops me.
“You should not be here,” he tells me. “You cannot come through.”
At least this man speaks English. I’m so grateful for this, so warmly, deeply grateful.
“Perhaps you could help me,” I say. “I’m looking for Captain Lehmann.”
“Could you repeat the name?” he says.
I tell him again.
A sliver of recognition comes in his face.
“Captain Gunther Lehmann?”
“Yes.”
“I know Captain Lehmann,” he says.
I feel a hot rush of gratitude. This is all playing out as it was intended to do, everything happening as it was meant to happen. I could fling my arms around the man.
“I’m so glad,” I say. “Could you tell me where to find him? I’d be so grateful.”
“The captain has gone. You cannot see him,” he says.
I shake my head. I’m almost laughing, that he is so wrong about everything.
“You’re not serious, are you? You’re having me on,” I say, smiling, sharing the joke, sust
ained by my absolute certainty that this is meant to be.
The phrase makes no sense to him. He frowns.
“I don’t understand you,” he says.
“You’re joking, aren’t you? You don’t mean it.” I’m so confident, so certain. Though my voice is a little too shrill. “You don’t mean that he’s gone. He can’t have gone. . . .”
The man says nothing, points upward.
I look up there, where he is pointing. I see the black fleck of a climbing plane, which, as I watch, is lost and gone in the empty shine of the sky.
Chapter 82
OCTOBER IS COLD, with a wind that blusters through the wreck of my orchard, the boughs in the lanes bare and blackened with wet, above us a white rushing sky. Our daily lives take so much thought and planning and care: there’s even less food in the shops now. I’m permanently exhausted, my body heavy and slow. Yet in a way I’m grateful for all the demands of this life, which leave me little time to think. I try to keep cheerful for Blanche and Millie. I only let myself cry in the evening, when they are up in their rooms, or at night when I wake in my empty bed and press my face into my pillow.
One late afternoon in November, I’m making tea in the kitchen when there’s a knock at the door. An assertive male knock. I think for a half-crazed moment that my desperate prayers have been answered—that he has been given back to me. I open the door.
I feel a sense of disappointment, shading into dislike. It’s Piers Falla.
“Hello, Piers.”
“Mrs. de la Mare. I want to show you something,” he says.
He’s abrupt, as always. His eyes seem to see right into me, that look that makes me think of a bird of prey, expecting something of me.
“What do you want to show me?” I ask.
“You’ll see. You have to come with me.” And, when I hesitate, “It’ll be worth it, I promise.”
I grab my coat: there’s a winter chill in the air. I warn Millie that I’m going out. I follow Piers down the lane, through the dusk that softly settles around us. He turns onto a track that leads up the wooded side of the hill, a path I’ve never walked before. I follow him through the dull, dormant woods. The colors of the countryside are muted in the gloom—russet, cinnamon, nutmeg, like the hides of animals. There’s a slight wind in the branches, and our footsteps rustle on the path, which is deeply drifted with leaves.
The silence between us is awkward. Piers is not an easy person.
“You must miss Johnnie,” I say, to break the silence.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I miss him. . . . All those things we did together—I never thought it would end like this. Just because of a stupid mistake.”
“But it isn’t such a long sentence,” I say. “He should be back in July.”
“As long as he doesn’t get lost in the system,” says Piers. “Sent off to some more terrible place.”
“Oh,” I say. “But surely that can’t happen, can it? Surely it’s better organized than that?”
“There are rumors that it’s happened to others,” he says.
“Oh.” I feel a shiver of fear for Johnnie.
We walk on up the whispering path. A jay breaks cover in front of us; its flash of blue, bright as sapphires, is startling against the sepia gloom of the wood. Around us, we hear the myriad small voices of the streams.
Piers clears his throat; the sound is too loud in the stillness.
“Some of those things we did, Johnnie and me,” he says, out of nowhere, and stops. Then he tries again. “There are things I used to think mattered, that don’t matter so much anymore. Things that aren’t really important. . . .”
I know that he is saying sorry to me.
I glance toward him. His face is working: he’s trying to find the right words.
“The way we used to do things, when the Occupation began. We were just kids then. To be honest, we were just playing around,” he tells me.
“You wanted to do what you could,” I say. “I can understand that.”
He doesn’t seem to hear me.
“What I’ve learned,” he says, “it’s what a person does when their moment comes. When something is required of them. What they do with the time that is given them. That’s what matters. . . . The other things aren’t important—who you fall in love with, all of that.”
I feel uncomfortable: I don’t know how to respond. Yet at the same time I’m grateful he said that.
We climb up the steep twisting path through the trees and their tangled shadows, and come out at the top to windy brightness and sky and all the wide air beyond the wood, where there are cornfields and the shine of the sea. The moment that is like a birth—coming up out of the womb of our deep wooded valley and into the light.
I see with a stir of alarm that we have come to the work camp on the clifftop—the camp that Johnnie described, that I never wanted to see. The camp that Kirill came from. I see the high barbed-wire fence, the shacks where the slave workers sleep, the wooden watchtowers. I think of the things that people say they have witnessed here. Of men left beaten and bleeding. Of a man who was hanged from a tree, and the body left hanging for days.
We move a little closer. I see that the grass in front of the buildings has all been worn away, leaving just bare earth and mud. A bonfire has been made there. Many men sit around the fire; they are thin and ragged and desolate-looking. A guard is watching them vaguely—bored, not very vigilant, absently smoking a cigarette. The men are quiet, scarcely stirring, not even talking together. They have the look that Kirill had, on that long-ago day when I first saw him in Peter Mahy’s barn, their faces blank with exhaustion.
But then, as we watch, something moves through the men like a summer wind through wheat—a sudden disturbance, shouts, a slow hand clap. I wonder what will happen. Two men get up from the ground. They have dark hair, sun-browned skin: they could be the Gypsies that Johnnie said were among the prisoners here. They stand facing each other, as though they are sparring together, so just for an instant I wonder if they will fight. But they raise their arms above their heads and click their fingers in time; they sway a little and start to dance, stamping their feet on the bare earth, their rags of clothes flying wildly with the swaying of their bodies. The other men cheer, then fall silent. I watch the gestures of the dancers as they beckon, conjure, caress. There is such eloquence in the movements they make: they speak of desire, of solace, of a brief and broken triumph. When they pass in front of the firelight, they seem to hold all that red light and warmth in their hands.
I think of Kirill—of his homeland, the stories he told, all the things he dreamed of. I think, We all have such richness in us—the lives we have lived, the people we have loved, all the things we have longed for. Wherever we go, whatever happens, we carry this richness within us. Whatever is done to us, whatever is taken from us.
And then it ends, as abruptly as it began. Their feet stamp to a close, their hands fall emptily to their sides, they sink to the earth by the fire, their shadows hunched in front of them. The watching men applaud and then are quiet. Silence falls like a leaf. It is all as it was before. Or almost as it was before.
We too are still for a moment.
I turn to Piers. In the dimming light, his kestrel face doesn’t look quite as stern as I’d thought.
“Was that what you wanted to show me?” I say then.
“No.”
“But I’m glad that I saw it,” I say.
He nods slightly, acknowledging this.
“This is what I wanted to show you,” he says. “There’s a place in the wire—over there by that ditch. . . .”
I look where he is pointing, to a place where a thicket of hazel trees shades over a ditch and almost reaches the fence. There’s a lot of cover. You could get very close and not be seen.
“Yes,” I say.
“There’s a rip in the wire there. The prisoners keep it open. You can leave food there. Under those trees, just outside the fence. If you have any food you can spare,
you can bring it here and leave it. The best time is just before curfew.”
“What if the guard sees me?” I say.
“It depends who’s on duty,” he says. “Sometimes they turn a blind eye. Some of them aren’t bothered, like that man there today. We’ve had other people do this. With luck you should be all right. . . . There’s always a risk, of course. But then you know that.”
“Yes.”
The shadows are long now, but there are still a few tatters of light in the sky. The brightness reflects in Piers’s keen gaze.
“I’m sorry we lost Kirill,” he says. “But there are others that we can help keep alive.”
“Until the war is over?”
“Until we win,” he tells me. Sounding just like Johnnie.
Will we win? I think. How can we? Is it possible? It seems beyond imagining.
“So what do you think, Mrs. de la Mare? Will you do what you can?”
But he already knows my answer.
Chapter 83
A FEW MONTHS AFTER the end of the war, a postcard comes for me.
I CYCLE TO St. Peter Port. It’s a sunny April afternoon. The town is calm and orderly: the shops are all open, people mill in the streets. Mothers scold their children, people at bus stops grumble—about the weather, the government, how much everything costs. I think how readily we return to the predictable life of peacetime—those of us who are left, who are lucky: we brush the dust of the past from us, sweep up the fragments, move on.
I leave my bicycle at the foot of the steps that lead up to the tea shop. Mrs. du Barry’s has closed now, but this new place has opened. You can sit on the terrace when it’s warm, and I thought it would be a good choice.
I climb the steps to the terrace. I glance back over the steep red-tiled roofs, but you can’t see the water from here, you wouldn’t know you were on an island, except for the quality of the light, which is at once soft and lustrous, and has the silvery clarity of sunlight over the sea.
The place is busy: women meeting their friends and gossiping over tea and gâche, men doing business, a nanny with boisterous children. For a moment, I’m confused by all the color and movement and talk, and I can’t see him. Then I spot him, at a table in the corner of the terrace. He’s wearing a sober business suit and tie. He looks entirely different in civilian clothes—less certain, less authoritative. He sees me and stands as I approach. He takes my hand and gives a little bow.
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