by Isabel Wolff
‘The Jaeger …’ said Mrs Bell as I snapped shut the clasps. ‘I would like to give it all to a charity shop as I want to get rid of as much as I can while I’m in the mood to do so. I would ask my home-help, Paola, but she is away. Is there any chance that you could do it for me, Phoebe?’
‘Of course.’ I put the clothes in a large carrier bag. ‘There’s the Oxfam shop – shall I take them there?’
‘Please,’ said Mrs Bell. ‘Thank you. Now, go and make yourself comfortable while I make the coffee.’
In the sitting room, the gas fire emitted its low hiss. The sun shone through the small square panes of the bow window, casting a grid of shadows across the room like the bars of a cage.
Mrs Bell came in with the tray and with a shaking hand poured us both a cup of coffee from the silver pot. As we drank it she asked me about the shop, and about how I’d started it. I told her some more about myself and my background. I then discovered that she had a nephew by marriage who lived in Dorset who sometimes visited her, and a niece in Lyon who didn’t.
‘But it’s difficult for her as she has to look after her two young grandchildren, but she phones me from time to time. She is my closest relative – the daughter of my late brother, Marcel.’
We chatted for a few more minutes, then the carriage clock chimed half past twelve.
I put down my cup. ‘I ought to get going. But thank you for the coffee, Mrs Bell. It’s been lovely to see you again.’
A look of regret crossed her face. ‘I have so enjoyed seeing you, Phoebe. I am rather hoping you will stay in touch,’ she added. ‘But you are a very busy young woman. Why ever would you want to bother …?’
‘I’d love to stay in touch,’ I interjected. ‘But for now I should get back to the shop – plus I don’t want to tire you.’
‘I am not tired,’ Mrs Bell said. ‘For once I have a strange kind of energy.’
‘Well … can I do anything for you before I go?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘But thank you.’
‘I’ll say goodbye then – for now.’ I stood up.
Mrs Bell was staring at me, as though weighing something in her mind. ‘Stay a little longer,’ she said suddenly. ‘Please.’ My heart filled with pity. The poor woman was lonely and needed company. And I was about to tell her that I could stay for another twenty minutes or so when Mrs Bell disappeared, crossing the corridor into the bedroom, where I heard the wardrobe door being opened. When she returned she was holding the blue coat.
She looked at me, her eyes shining with a strange intensity. ‘You wanted to know about this …’
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘It’s … none of my business.’
‘You were curious.’
I stared at her, aghast. ‘A … little,’ I conceded. ‘But it’s not my concern, Mrs Bell. I shouldn’t have touched it.’
‘But I want to tell you about it,’ she said. ‘I want to tell you about this little coat, and why I hid it. More than anything else, Phoebe, I want to tell you why I have kept it for so long.’
‘You don’t have to tell me anything,’ I protested weakly. ‘You barely know me.’
Mrs Bell sighed. ‘That’s true. But, lately, I have felt a great need to tell someone the story – the story that I have kept inside all these years – here – right here.’ She jabbed at her chest, hard, with the fingers of her left hand. ‘And for some reason I feel that if I were to tell anyone – it would be you.’
I stared at her. ‘Why?’
‘I’m not sure,’ she replied carefully. ‘I only know that I feel some … affinity with you, Phoebe – some connection that I can’t explain.’
‘Oh. But … in any case, why would you want to talk about it now?’ I asked weakly. ‘After so long?’
‘Because …’ Mrs Bell sank on to the sofa, anxiety etched on her face. ‘Last week – in fact, while you were here – I received the results of some medical tests. They do not exactly augur well for my future,’ she went on calmly. ‘I had already guessed that the news would not be positive from the way my weight has been falling lately.’ Now I understood Mrs Bell’s odd reaction when I’d suggested that she was ‘downsizing’. ‘I have been offered treatment, but have declined. It would be very unpleasant, it would only buy me a little extra time, and at my age …’ She held up her hands, as if in surrender. ‘I am almost eighty years old, Phoebe. That is a longer life than many – as you know only too well.’ I thought of Emma. ‘But now, with this acute sense I have of life retreating, the anguish I’ve felt for so long has only got worse.’ She looked imploringly at me. ‘I need to tell just one person about this coat, now, while I am still clear in my mind. I need that one person just to listen, and perhaps to understand what I did, and why.’ She looked towards the garden, the shadows from the window frames bisecting her face. ‘I suppose the truth is I need to confess. If I believed in God I would go to a priest.’ She turned her gaze back to me. ‘Could I tell you, Phoebe? Please? It will not take long, I promise – no more than a few minutes.’
I nodded, bemused, then sat down. Mrs Bell leaned forward on her chair, fingering the coat, which was laid across her lap, lifelessly. She took a deep breath, her eyes narrowing as she now looked past me, through the window, as though it were a portal to the past.
‘I come from Avignon,’ she began. ‘You know that.’ I nodded. ‘I grew up in a large village about three miles from the city centre. It was a sleepy sort of place, with narrow streets leading on to a large square which was shaded by plane trees, with a few shops and a pleasant bar. On the north side of the square was the church, over the door of which was carved, in huge Roman letters, Liberté, Égalité et Fraternité.’ At that a sardonic smile flickered across Mrs Bell’s face. ‘The village bordered open countryside,’ she went on, ‘and was skirted by a railway line. My father worked in the centre of Avignon, where he managed a hardware store. He also had a little vineyard not far from the house. My mother was maîtresse de maison, looking after my father, me, and my younger brother, Marcel. To make a little extra money she took in sewing.’
Mrs Bell tucked a stray wisp of white hair behind her ear. ‘Marcel and I went to the local school. It was very small – there were no more than a hundred children, many of them descended from families who had lived in the village for generations – the same names would come up again and again – Caron, Paget, Marigny – and Aumage.’ It was clear that this last name was to be of particular significance. Mrs Bell shifted a little on her seat. ‘In September 1940, when I was eleven, a new girl joined my class. I had seen her once or twice over the summer, but I hadn’t known who she was. My mother said that she’d heard that the girl and her family had moved to our village from Paris. My mother had added that, after the Occupation, many such families had fled to the south.’ Mrs Bell looked at me. ‘I could not know it at the time, but that little word “such” was to prove of immense significance. Anyway, this girl’s name was …’ Mrs Bell’s voice caught ‘… Monique,’ she whispered after a moment. ‘Her name was Monique … Richelieu – and I was assigned to look after her.’ At this Mrs Bell began to stroke the coat, consolingly almost, then she looked through the window again.
‘Monique was a sweet, friendly girl. She was clever and hard-working; she was also very pretty with lovely cheekbones, a quick expression in her dark eyes, and hair so black that in certain lights it looked blue. And, however much she tried to disguise it, she had a foreign inflexion to her voice that stood out all the more amongst the Provençal accents that were spoken around her.’ Mrs Bell looked at me. ‘Whenever Monique was teased about this at school, she would say that her accent was Parisian. But my parents said that it wasn’t Parisian – it was German.’
Mrs Bell clasped her hands together, the enamelled bangle she was wearing clinking gently against the gold bracelet of her watch. ‘Monique started coming over to my house to play, and we would roam the fields and hillsides together, picking wild flowers, chatting about girlish things. I sometimes aske
d her about Paris, which I had only ever seen in photographs. Monique told me about her life in the city, although she was always vague about where precisely her family had lived. But she often talked about her best friend, Miriam. Miriam’ – Mrs Bell’s face suddenly lit up – ‘Lipietzka. The name has just come back to me – after all these years.’ She looked at me, shaking her head in wonderment. ‘This is what happens, Phoebe, when you are old. Things long buried suddenly surface with startling clarity. Lipietzka,’ she murmured. ‘Of course … I think she said that they were originally from the Ukraine. But Monique told me that she very much missed Miriam, of whom she was terribly proud, not least because Miriam was a wonderful violinist. I remember feeling quite a pang as Monique talked about Miriam, and I secretly hoped that in time I might become Monique’s best friend – even though I had no musical ability at all. I remember I enjoyed going to Monique’s house, which was some way away, on the other side of the village, near the railway line. It had a pretty front garden with lots of flowers, and a well, and above the front door was a plaque with the head of a lion carved on to it.’
Mrs Bell put down her cup. ‘Monique’s father was a dreamy, rather impractical sort of man. Each day he cycled into Avignon, where he worked as a book-keeper for a firm of accountants. Her mother stayed at home looking after Monique’s twin brothers, Olivier and Christophe, who were then three. I remember once when I was there Monique cooked the entire evening meal, despite being only ten at the time. She told me that she’d had to learn how to cook because her mother had been bedridden for two months after the twins were born. Monique was a very good cook, though I remember not liking the bread very much.
‘Anyway … on went the war. We children were aware of it, but we knew little about it because of course there were no televisions, few radios, and the adults sheltered us from it as far as they could. In fact, they hardly spoke of it in our hearing, except to complain about rationing – my father’s main complaint was that it was hard to get beer.’ Mrs Bell paused again, her lips pursing slightly. ‘One day, in the summer of 1941, by which time we had become close friends, Monique and I went for a walk. After about two miles or so along one of the little back roads that criss-cross the area we came upon a ramshackle old barn. As we went inside it to explore we happened to be talking about names. I said that I didn’t like my name – Thérèse. I felt it was too ordinary. I wished that my parents had called me Chantal. Then I asked Monique if she liked hers. To my surprise she went very red – then she suddenly blurted out that Monique wasn’t her real name. Her real name was Monika – Monika Richter. I was …’ Mrs Bell shook her head in wonderment. ‘Amazed. Then Monique said that her family had moved to Paris from Mannheim, five years earlier, and that her father had changed their name to make them fit in. He’d decided on Richelieu, she told me, because of the famous Cardinal.’
Mrs Bell looked out of the window again. ‘When I asked Monique why they’d left Germany, she replied that it was because they didn’t feel safe. At first she refused to say why, but when I pressed her she told me that it was because her family were Jewish. She told me that they never spoke of this to anyone, and that they hid all outward signs of it. Then she made me swear never to reveal what she had said to a living soul, otherwise we could no longer be friends. I agreed, of course, although I couldn’t understand why being Jewish had to be a secret – I knew that Jewish people had lived in Avignon for hundreds of years; there was an old synagogue in the city centre. But if that was how Monique felt, I would respect it.’
Mrs Bell began to finger the coat again, stroking the sleeves. ‘Then I felt I should offer Monique a secret of my own. So I confided that I had recently fallen in love with a boy in our school – Jean-Luc Aumage.’ Mrs Bell’s lips were pressed into a thin line. ‘I remember, when I told Monique about Jean-Luc, that she looked a little uncomfortable. Then she said that he did seem to be a nice boy and that he was certainly good looking.’
Mrs Bell’s eyes strayed to the window again. ‘Time went by, and we did our best to ignore the war, thankful to be living in the southern “free” zone. But one morning – it was in late June ’42, I could see that Monique was very upset. She told me that she had just received a letter from Miriam in which Miriam had told her that she was now required, as were all Jewish people in the Occupied Zone, to wear a yellow star. This six-pointed star, which had to be sewn on to the left side of her jacket, had in the centre one word – “Juive”. Mrs Bell rearranged the coat on her lap, repeatedly smoothing the blue fabric. ‘From that time on I opened my ears to the war. At night I would sit on the landing, outside my parents’ room, straining to hear the broadcasts from BBC London, which they covertly tuned in to; like many people, my father had bought our first wireless just for that purpose. I remember that when they were listening to these bulletins I would hear my father exclaim in disgust or despair. From one of these programmes I learned that there were now special laws for Jewish people in both zones. They were not allowed to join the army, or to hold important jobs in government any more or to buy property. They had to observe a curfew and in Paris they were obliged to travel in the last carriage on the Metro.
‘The next day I asked my mother why these things were happening, but she would only say that we were living in difficult times and that it was best for me not to think about this dreadful war which would soon be over – gracèa Dieu.
‘So we tried to carry on with our lives as “normal”. But in November 1942 that pretence of normality came to an abrupt end. On November 12th my father came home early, all out of breath, to say that he had seen two German soldiers, with machine guns attached to the sidecars of their motorbikes, stationed at the main road leading from our village to the city centre.
‘The next morning, along with many others, my parents, my brother and I walked into Avignon and were horrified to see German soldiers standing beside their official, shiny black Citroëns which were parked in rows outside the Palais des Papes. We saw other German troops stationed outside the town hall, or riding down our historic streets in armoured vehicles, wearing helmets and goggles. To us children they looked funny – like aliens – and I remember my parents being angry with Marcel and me for pointing at them and laughing. They told us to look through them as though they weren’t there. They said that if all the people of Avignon did that, then the Germans’ presence wouldn’t affect us. But Marcel and I knew that this was just bravado – we understood perfectly well that the “free zone” no longer existed and that now we were all “sous la botte”!’
Mrs Bell paused, and tucked another wisp of hair behind her ear.
‘From then on Monique became distant and watchful. At the end of school each day she would go straight home. She was no longer free to play on Sundays, and I was no longer invited to her house. I was hurt by this, but when I tried to talk to her about it, she just said that she had less time now because her mother needed her to help at home more.
‘A month later, I was queuing to buy flour when I overheard the man in front of me complaining that from now on all Jewish people in our area had to have their identity and ration cards stamped with the word “Jew”. The man, who I realised must himself be Jewish, said it was a dreadful affront. His family had lived in France for three generations – had he not fought for France during the Great War?’ Mrs Bell narrowed her pale blue eyes. ‘I remember he shook his fist at the church and said where now was the notion of Liberté, Égalité et Fraternité? I just thought to myself, naïvely, ‘At least he’s not being made to wear the star, like Miriam has to – that would be … awful.’ She looked at me, then shook her head. ‘Little did I know that wearing the yellow star would have been infinitely preferable to the stamping of official papers.’
Mrs Bell closed her eyes for a moment, as if exhausted by her memories. Then she opened them again, staring ahead. ‘In early 1943, around the middle of February, I saw Monique standing by the school gate, deep in conversation with Jean-Luc, who by now was a very handsome young m
an of fifteen. I could see from the way he wrapped her scarf a little closer round her neck – it was bitterly cold – that he was very attracted to Monique. I could also see that she liked him, because of the way she was smiling up at him, not encouragingly exactly, but sweetly and … a little anxiously I suppose.’ Mrs Bell sighed then shook her head. ‘I was still infatuated with Jean-Luc, even though he’d never so much as looked at me. What a fool I was,’ she added bleakly. ‘What a fool.’ She tapped her chest again, as though striking herself. Then she went on, her voice shaking: ‘The next day I asked Monique if she liked Jean-Luc. She just looked at me very intently, almost sadly, and said, “Thérèse, you don’t understand,” which only seemed to confirm that she did like him. Then I remembered how she’d reacted when I’d first told her about my crush. She’d seemed uncomfortable, and now I knew why.’ Mrs Bell was tapping her chest again. ‘But Monique was right – I didn’t understand. If only I had,’ she croaked. She shook her head. ‘If only I had …’
Mrs Bell paused for a moment to collect herself, then carried on. ‘After school I ran home in tears. My mother asked me why I was crying, but I was too embarrassed to tell her. Then she put her arms round me and told me to dry my eyes because she had a surprise for me. She went to her sewing corner and brought out a bag. Inside was a lovely little coat of wool as blue as the sky on a clear June morning. As I tried it on, she told me that she had queued for five hours to buy the material and that she had sewed it for me at night, while I was asleep. I hugged my mother and said that I loved the coat so much that I would keep it forever. She laughed and said, “No you won’t, silly.”’ Mrs Bell gave me a bleak smile. ‘But I have.’
She stroked the lapels again, the lines on her brow scored a little deeper now. ‘Then, one day in April, Monique didn’t come to school. She didn’t come the next day either, or the day after that. When I asked our teacher where Monique was she said she didn’t know but that she was sure she’d be back before long. Then the Easter holidays started, and still I didn’t see Monique, and I kept asking my parents where she might be, but they told me that it would be better to forget her – I would make new friends. I said I didn’t want new friends – I wanted Monique. So the next morning I ran to her house. I knocked on the door, but no one came. I peered through a gap in the shutters and saw the remains of a meal on the table. There was a broken plate on the floor. Seeing that they had left in a dreadful rush, I resolved to write to Monique at once. I sat down by the well, and I’d started to compose a letter to her in my head when I realised that of course I couldn’t write to her because I hadn’t the faintest idea where she was. I felt just terrible …’ I heard Mrs Bell swallow.