Never Anyone But You

by Rupert Thomson

  “Suzanne,” he said. “You were always hanging about—always there…”

  There was a domineering edge to his voice that I couldn’t remember hearing before. The years must have changed him—or perhaps it was just the alcohol.

  Claude came to my rescue. “You’re well, though, Bob?”

  “Never better,” he said.

  He drained his pint, and for a moment he was all unshaven throat and chin. Then his face came back down. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

  “Well, it was nice seeing you.” Claude took my arm.

  Bob’s mood shifted again, and he became jovial, almost clownlike. Stepping back, he lifted an imaginary hat and sketched a bow. One of the men behind him laughed.

  “Nice seeing you too,” Bob said.

  We moved past him, towards our house.

  Once inside, I asked Claude if she was all right.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  She laid the wildflowers on the hall table.

  “He looked so much older…” She went to the mirror and studied herself.

  “Did you ever find out who he got married to?” I asked.

  “Some local girl,” she said. “I forget her name.”

  Even if she knew the girl’s name, she would never admit to remembering it.

  “He was very drunk,” she said.

  “Yes, he was.”

  “So uncouth.” She gave a little shudder. “I don’t know what I ever saw in him.”

  “I know exactly what you saw,” I said.

  She glanced at me in the mirror, startled, but I was already turning away.

  On July 1, three days after the bombing raid that had caught us unawares, a small group of German officers landed at the airport, and by the end of that week several hundred troops were billeted on the island, including dozens of Luftwaffe pilots. These young men might be losing the Battle of Britain, but they didn’t seem in any doubt about the eventual outcome of the war, and they were a constant presence in St. Helier in their immaculate gray uniforms, drinking coffee, having their hair cut and their nails manicured, and buying gifts for their loved ones. If they were full of themselves, they were also courteous, stepping off the pavement to let women pass and greeting everyone they came across, not at all the monsters people had been expecting. As early as the first week of August, dances were organized in two or three of the more exclusive hotels. Rumbas were played, and foxtrots. Viennese waltzes.

  According to the guidelines laid down by the Bailiff, we were supposed to maintain “correct relations” with the invaders, but where did correct relations end and fraternization begin? From the outset, Claude and I took a hard line. If a German soldier spoke to us, we would ignore him, and Claude, being Claude, usually went further.

  “Why won’t you talk to me?” a soldier asked as we were crossing Royal Square during the first month of the occupation.

  “Because you shouldn’t be here,” Claude said in a clear voice. “Because we despise you.”

  The soldier looked down at his boots.

  I admired her integrity, I told her afterwards, her courage too, but I felt compelled to caution her. If she persisted with that sort of behavior she would be arrested. Claude shrugged and said she didn’t care.

  Later, I learned that the Germans had a name for people like us, who refused to acknowledge their presence. They called us “ghosts.” How intriguing, I thought, that they should think to turn things around like that. We were treating them as though they didn’t exist, and yet somehow we were the ones who had become invisible.

  One hot night I was woken by the tapping of a typewriter. I glanced at the clock. Ten past two. Putting on my dressing gown, I stood at the window. It was high tide. The air was heavy with the smell of jasmine, and the sea had the consistency of oil. The typing stopped. Through the wall I heard Claude murmur something to herself and laugh.

  I walked into the next room, my feet cooled by the bare boards. Claude was sitting in front of her black Underwood. Except for the silk scarf tied around her head and the Moroccan slippers on her feet she was naked, though a pale-green robe was draped over the back of her chair. Lying on the desk, next to the typewriter, was a revolver I had never seen before. Claude’s brown skin gleamed in the lamplight. So did the barrel of the gun. Only a few days earlier, the German authorities had issued an order in the Evening Post, demanding that all weapons be handed in. Claude had obviously paid no attention.

  “Where did that come from?” I asked.

  Claude glanced at me across one shoulder. “I thought you were sleeping.”

  “You woke me up.”

  “Just as well. We need to talk.” Claude drew her robe around her and lit a cigarette, then she went to the open window and looked out into the night. “The Nazis must be resisted at all costs, on ideological grounds. We’re agreed on that, aren’t we.”

  Folding my arms, I leaned against the wall. “Of course.”

  “It’s not enough just to ignore them when we pass them on the street. We need to do more.”

  “For example?”

  “Did you hear about the dentist?”

  Apparently, there was a man in St. Helier—a dental surgeon—who had been attacking members of the Gestapo when they were walking back to their barracks late at night. He would surprise them in dark alleys, she said, and knock them out cold. In his youth, he had been a welterweight boxing champion.

  “You made that up,” I said.

  She tapped some ash into the ivy that grew around the window. “It’s true.”

  “So you want to start attacking the Nazis,” I said, “with your bare fists?”

  She smiled. “You sounded like your brother then. That’s the kind of thing he used to say.”

  “What are you proposing, Claude?”

  Her eyes drifted towards the gun.

  “You’re not serious,” I said.

  “It belonged to my father.”

  “Does it work?”

  She shrugged. “There’s no reason to think it wouldn’t.”

  I walked over and picked up the gun. It was lighter than I had expected, and the wooden grip felt comfortable, as though it had been made with my hand in mind. I wondered if that inbuilt seductive appeal was part of the design.

  “It’s a Ruby,” Claude said. “Standard issue for the French military during the last war.” She crushed out her cigarette and took the gun from me, her forefinger curling around the trigger. “It holds nine rounds. That ought to be enough, don’t you think?”

  “For what?”

  As I was well aware, she said, the Nazis had commandeered the northeast corner of the churchyard for their own dead soldiers. Two days earlier, while I was shopping in St. Helier, she had watched from an upstairs window as a funeral took place. When the staff cars arrived, they were carrying the most important Nazi dignitaries on the island, including Gussek, the Kommandant. They parked by the entrance to the churchyard, right opposite the door that led to our garden. They looked so nonchalant, she said. So utterly at ease. You would never have guessed they were fighting a war, or that they were on enemy territory.

  “What struck me forcibly,” she went on, “was the fact that they appeared to take their security for granted. In that moment, despite their armor-plated cars and their automatic weapons, they suddenly seemed vulnerable in a way I couldn’t have predicted or imagined.” She put the revolver back on the desk and reached for her packet of Craven A’s. “That was when I had the idea.”

  “I know what you’re going to say.”

  She lit a cigarette. “It would be so easy.”

  “You don’t know how to shoot.”

  “I could learn.”

  I looked at her. “You could learn.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I could.”

  Later that same day, Claude and I set off al
ong the road that led east, towards Le Frêt. We were making for the woods on the headland, where we would have some privacy. It was late August. The sky had clouded over, and the air felt dense, electric. I hoped no one stopped us. It would be hard to explain why we were carrying a loaded revolver and an empty shoe box.

  I was still trying to dissuade Claude, even as we walked, but she was in the grip of a scenario she had already spent a lot of time imagining. When the day came, she told me, she would pretend to be a widow visiting her husband’s grave. She would wear black, perhaps even a hat with a veil. Circling the house, she would make her way slowly and painfully along the road towards the churchyard. She would be carrying a prop of some sort—flowers, or a prayer book.

  Picture it, she said. The entrance to the churchyard, the parked cars with their Nazi pennants, the officers standing in groups in the winter sunlight, their greatcoats draped over their shoulders, talking and smoking…Since they only had eyes for the blond-haired beauties of the island, they would be unlikely to pay any attention to the old crone who was approaching. When she passed behind the Kommandant, she would take out her revolver and fire several shots at close range. The sharp shocked smell of cordite, Gussek’s body lying facedown on the tarmac…

  I sighed, then shivered.

  “Don’t you see how clever it is?” she went on. “The death I’ll be dressed for isn’t the death of my husband, a death that happened in the past. After all, there is no husband. I’ll be dressed for the death that is about to happen. My widow’s weeds are for my enemy. My flowers are for him.” She paused. “Perhaps I’ll even toss them onto his dead body, as one might toss flowers onto a coffin once it has been lowered into the ground.”

  “No, Claude,” I said. “I won’t let you do it.”

  “Think of how it will reverberate. The head of the occupying forces shot dead—and by a woman! They’ll probably discuss it on the BBC.”

  “No.”

  “What’s wrong? You see a flaw?” She had a look on her face that I had seen many times: the confidence—no, arrogance—of someone who felt not only justified but unassailable.

  “You don’t know how to use a gun.”

  “That’s why we’re going to the woods—for a bit of target practice. It can’t be that difficult.”

  When we reached the top of the hill we turned off the road and followed a track that led towards the headland. Since leaving the bay, we had passed nobody. We’d not been seen. At first there was heather on either side of us, but soon the trees closed over our heads. Oak, sweet chestnut. Pine. We followed a narrow path that curved down into a gully. All the sound drained out of the world. I couldn’t even hear the sea. There was only the rustle of our shoes in the undergrowth.

  Once at the bottom, we found an area of level ground, the sky blocked out by overhanging foliage.

  “This is as good a place as any,” I said.

  I set the shoe box on a fallen tree trunk and stood back. Claude aimed the gun. There was a crack, and her arm jerked sideways and upwards. A bird took off, wings clattering. Claude tried to hide her look of shock. The shoe box was still intact.

  “Where did the bullet go?” she asked.

  “I didn’t see.”

  “I think I hurt my shoulder.”

  She took a step closer and pointed the gun at the shoe box. It seemed impossible that she could miss. She fired again. This time I saw something fly through the air. A piece of bark had been gouged from a nearby tree, a streak of white appearing on the trunk.

  “Am I getting closer?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe.”

  Another shot, and then another. I walked over and checked the shoe box. Not a mark on it. The gun had jammed. Claude dropped it on the ground and bent over, holding her wrist. Pain tightened her mouth. I picked up the gun. The barrel was hot to the touch.

  “I think you should forget it,” I said.

  She gave me a fierce look, her body in a kind of crouch, like a vulture interrupted while feasting on a carcass.

  “Well, you’re not exactly a crack shot,” I said, “are you.”

  “Maybe if I keep practicing…”

  But I could tell from her voice that she no longer had the stomach for it.

  I put the gun in my pocket and retrieved the shoe box and started back up the path. At the top of the slope I stopped. Claude was still standing where I had left her.

  “Aren’t you coming?” I said.

  Nursing her right wrist in her left hand, she began to climb the slope. Neither of us spoke.

  “It’s probably just as well,” I said when we reached the road again. “I understand the attraction of a single dramatic act, but there are other considerations.”

  Claude was listening, head lowered.

  “Think of how it would rebound on the local population,” I went on. “It’s not just you who would be punished. The Nazis would become vengeful, draconian. There might even be random executions.” I paused. “What I’m saying is, it would be selfish on your part.”

  Claude placed a cigarette between her lips, but seemed to be having trouble lighting it. In the end, I had to light it for her.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  She still hadn’t looked at me.

  It was then that I heard the rumble of an engine. In the distance I could see a dark-green German army truck laboring up the hill towards us in low gear. I took the gun from my pocket and dropped it in the ditch. We walked on, towards our house. As the truck passed by, one of the soldiers waved at us. Claude had averted her gaze, and didn’t notice. I gave him a curt nod. Once the truck had vanished round the bend, I went back for the gun. Claude stayed where she was, smoking.

  “This isn’t about you,” I said when I returned. “This is about everybody who lives on the island.”

  “In your opinion, then,” Claude said slowly, “it would be better if I didn’t kill the Kommandant.”

  I looked at her, and she looked at me, and suddenly her face crumpled. She was laughing. To the second German army truck that passed us a few moments later, we were just two harmless old women, sharing a joke.

  Little did they know.

  That autumn, while we were out looking for blackberries, Claude noticed a cigarette packet lying at the edge of the road. It was green, with a number 5 in the middle. She bent down and picked the packet up. ECKSTEIN. A German brand. This made sense, since we were about a mile inland from where we lived, on one of the roads that connected the airport with St. Helier. Claude wrote on the packet in red ink and put it back on the grass verge. The words were in German. Sieg? Nein. Krieg ohne Ende. Victory? No. War without end. I asked her what she was doing.

  “I’m giving the Germans something to think about,” she said.

  Unable to sleep the night before, she had been flicking through an old issue of the satirical monthly Le Crapouillot that focused on Germany when something in the text jumped out at her. Schrecken ohne Ende, oder Ende mit Schrecken. Terror without end, or an end to terror. The sentence seemed to resonate with our current predicament, she said. This was the choice we faced. This was the dilemma. She thought they were the kind of words that might prove useful in our propaganda campaign.

  Our propaganda campaign.

  I stared at her.

  “Well, it’s better than shooting someone, isn’t it,” she said.

  On every piece of packaging she came across that afternoon, she wrote the same words, or a variation on those words. Sometimes it was “War without end,” sometimes simply “Never-ending.”

  One morning shortly afterwards, I found her at the kitchen table, spooning jam onto a crust of bread. Next to her plate was a small black notebook, held open with a rubber band. Once I was sitting down, she told me she was thinking of walking along the main road again, only this time she would be actively looking for pieces of litter on which some
thing might be written. She had prepared a few slogans while I was asleep. She gave me a cool, measured look. She seemed to think I had been shirking my duties.

  “I’ll come with you,” I said.

  “I thought you disapproved.”

  “I didn’t say I disapproved. I just can’t see what good it will do.” I poured myself some coffee and reached for the bread. “Anyway, I don’t want you going alone.”

  “I’m not a child.”

  I sipped my coffee and said nothing.

  “All right,” she said. “You can come. It might look less suspicious if there are two of us.”

  She took a bite of bread and jam and pushed her notebook across the table. On the right-hand page I saw the following:

  Who has the right to sacrifice an entire nation to save a government?

  Why lay down your life for a lost cause?

  Hitler doesn’t care if you live or die.

  “These aren’t bad,” I said, “but they’ll have to be translated into German.”

  “That’s where you come in,” she said.

  As a child, I’d had governesses from Alsace, and I had learned to speak German even before I could speak French. Though I was no longer fluent, I still had a reasonable command of the language.

  “Ah,” I said, “so you do need me after all…”

  Claude placed her hand on mine. “I’ll always need you.”

  As Claude had suggested, the aim was to give the Germans something to think about, and it sprang from a shared belief that by no means all the soldiers who wore a German uniform were Nazis. They might simply, and unthinkingly, have obeyed Hitler’s call to arms. They might be patriots who believed it their duty to serve their country’s leader. They might never have paused to consider the rights and wrongs of the war in which they had become embroiled. And even if they did have Nazi sympathies, their allegiance might not stand up to scrutiny. It could be eroded, perhaps, or even dismantled. We liked to think that beneath every Nazi there was an ordinary decent human being, and if we could appeal to that human being, if we could present him with arguments that were sufficiently convincing, we might be able to change his mind.