by Caroline Lea
‘I will not take your shells, child,’ he said.
‘But how shall we pay you?’ She showed him a shell, her eyes stinging with tears. ‘Look, aren’t they beautiful? See all the colours? They are very rare. They took an age to find. You can have all of them. Even this big one, look. Just don’t… She cannot die, please.’
Dr Carter stood up. ‘I’m afraid your maman is very poorly indeed,’ he said. ‘She will have to go into hospital. Don’t worry about the cost. She may need to stay for a week or more, until she has recovered. She has something called pneumonia.’
Maman was shaking her head again; she tried to speak but she was coughing too much.
Claudine dropped her gaze to the floor. ‘Maman has said that we are not a charity to live off other people’s money. So you must take the ormers, please.’
Dr Carter smiled and patted her hand. ‘I see. Well, perhaps I could collect them some other time, then? I’d like to move your maman to hospital as soon as possible. Do you have anywhere you can stay? Family who can look after you, perhaps?’
She thought of Edith. ‘Maybe…’
‘Good. I’ll fetch my car.’
Claudine sat holding Maman’s hot hand. Her hair was stuck to her forehead, so Claudine stroked it back.
The doctor soon returned with his motorcar, and he lifted Maman up from the bed and carried her out. He put her on to the back seat, very gently.
Claudine said, ‘How strong you are!’
‘Well, she’s not very heavy. Hasn’t been eating enough, I suspect.’
‘She’s not hungry.’
He nodded. ‘Gives the food to you and the little boy, does she?’
He had very nice blue eyes, even though they were spidered with red veins. They were kind eyes. Before she could stop herself, Claudine blurted, ‘People say you’re a traitor. Why do they say that?’
He stopped smiling. ‘Which people?’
‘Nearly everyone, really. Edith doesn’t say it. Madame Bisson, I mean. She says she suspects you’re between a rock and a hard place.’
Dr Carter sighed. ‘Yes, that’s it, I suppose. Now look, I really must care for your mother. Do you have a neighbour, someone you can go to right now?’
‘Yes, I think so. Do you like the Germans more than you like Jèrriais people, then?’
He was climbing into his car, but he stopped and leant down so he could look at Claudine when he talked. He spoke slowly.
‘That’s a difficult question. Simply speaking, no, I don’t. Not at all. But I don’t dislike them simply because they are German. They are men first, German second. Does that make sense to you?’
Claudine grew thoughtful. ‘Don’t you think the Germans are bad then?’
‘Some of them, perhaps. But not all.’
He sat behind the wheel. Maman had fallen asleep.
‘Do you like the Commandant?’ Claudine asked. ‘Everybody says he’s a devil. Is it true?’
‘Sometimes, I’m afraid so.’
‘But then—why do you look after him?’
Dr Carter started his engine. ‘Sometimes it’s necessary to do the right thing,’ he said. ‘Sometimes the right thing is also wrong.’
Claudine watched the car bumping over the stones, and though she whispered his words to herself again and again, they still didn’t make any sense.
At first, Claudine told herself that she would be able to stay at home while Maman was in hospital. But then she had to go to school, and she wasn’t allowed to take Francis with her because he liked to scribble with the chalk and rip up the books and giggle during class prayer. She couldn’t leave him with any of the neighbours because they glared every time they saw the Durets—sometimes when Maman was in a black mood she was very rude, even when she didn’t mean to be.
Perhaps Edith won’t mind looking after us for a little while? Just until Maman is better.
But she needed someone to watch her brother while she ran to Edith’s house. Maman had offended many of the neighbours, so Claudine asked Madame Renouf, who lived ten doors away. She looked surprised at the request, but agreed to take Francis for the afternoon.
Claudine tried not to listen to Francis’s wails as she walked away.
‘I’ll be back soon, I promise.’
She had to walk along the beach to reach Edith’s house, past the shelter that she used to play in with Gregor. The sides were collapsing, like a gaping, septic wound where the ragged skin was crumpling into the body, unsupported by shattered bones. It smelt sour too, like an outhouse. Claudine tried not to look, tried not to breathe, tried not to think at all, but still memories of that night crept in. The soldier had whispered ‘Leibchen’ as his fingers pressed into her.
Sometimes she thought that if she could make her mind completely blank, like the unbroken surface of the sand after the sea had scrubbed it smooth, then she might be happy, or at least not quite so lost and pitted and empty.
The sea and the sky were white and grey, like rumpled smoke. The air was sharp and cold, but dry. It snagged in her chest, that promise of winter.
She tried not to think of the wood and food and favours they would need to outlast the cold. Too many grown-up thoughts: they beat around in her head like moths in a jam jar. War had given her all of the worries of an adult, with none of the adult power to resolve them.
Then she heard a commotion along the beach. She ran and hid behind a sand dune, held her breath and waited.
The voices belonged to soldiers. A big patrol, perhaps two. They were shouting, but the wind whipped their words into shapeless, angry noise.
There were lots of men, old men, dragging themselves along beside the soldiers. They were dressed in ragged, dirty clothes. They were hunched over, heaving big spades or shoving wheelbarrows. Instead of shoes, they had rags tied around their feet—filthy cloth, splattered with brownish stains that looked like dried blood.
The old men came closer and Claudine’s skin prickled with sudden comprehension: the men’s faces weren’t old at all. Some of them were young, not much older than Claudine. But their bodies were ancient. Stooped shoulders and sticks for arms and legs. And their skin hung loose on their scarecrow bones, as if they had borrowed the skin from much bigger men.
The men stopped walking and began to dig and heave rocks into piles. When they fell, the Germans shouted at them and kicked them until they stood again. That was all Claudine could hear—the sound of boots upon flesh, gasps of pain buffeted along by the cold wind.
These must be the prisoners of war, the ones that Gregor talked of.
A tall soldier was beating one of the prisoners for working too slowly. At first, the prisoner cried out and flailed his arms and legs. His cries were high-pitched, animal. The soldier struck rhythmically and the prisoner at last fell silent. But then the soldier kicked him, his boot to the back of the skull, and the prisoner’s head whipped forwards and then backwards, as if he were a wooden mannequin. Then he lay very still. A streamer of blood spooled out from his skull and pooled on the sand.
The soldier gestured at two of the other prisoners and they lifted the man, who was now slack-bodied, into a wheelbarrow and carried him to the half-built wall, where they laid the body down and then piled bricks on top of it, followed by shovelfuls of cement. They patted it down as if it were a carefully prepared loaf of bread.
Claudine had heard it whispered, of course, that the sea wall was being built upon the bodies of prisoners. That one day, people walking along the wall would be stepping on the stacked bones of murdered men. But seeing the truth of it made her insides convulse.
A different soldier shouted, ordering the prisoners back over to him. His voice left no room for argument: there was work to be done. Hurry, he bellowed, the harsh German consonants ricocheting off the sea and sand. Then the soldier took his helmet off to wipe the sweat from his forehead.
It was Gregor.
Claudine crouched behind the dunes. A feeling like frost water prickled over her head and dripped in
to her stomach. Her heart was going like the clappers. Gregor didn’t like her killing fish, and he’d never gutted the sand eels.
It couldn’t be him, watching all of this. It must be a soldier who looked very much like Gregor. The real Gregor would have stopped the soldier from beating the prisoner, surely?
She peeped up over the dune again. He had Gregor’s thin back, his curved shoulders. He had Gregor’s nose. When he shouted, it was Gregor’s voice, only harsher, more ferocious.
Claudine sat down again and stared out at the sea. None of the grey German buildings out there. No walls. No cement. No shouting, kicking, beating soldiers. No dead bodies of murdered prisoners packed away and hidden without a tear or a prayer. Except that… Perhaps it was happening too in another country across the sea. Perhaps it was the sort of thing that happened everywhere, all over the world, wherever there was a war.
There was no way to know.
Claudine closed her eyes, and rubbed her fists over her eyelids and she counted her teeth with her tongue. When she opened her eyes, nothing had changed.
THE Commandant had chosen a beautiful day at the end of December 1941 on which to put the young Frenchman, Soulette, in front of the firing squad. He ordered Father Gillard, the St Peter’s parish priest, to give the boy his last rites, and charged Carter with the task of covering the Frenchman’s injuries.
‘Make him look beautiful for my men, Doctor. I want him—how do you say?—with no spot or scratch.’
He slapped Carter’s shoulder and left his hot, heavy hand there a moment too long.
Carter nodded, compressing his lips into a smile. He took care not to look the Commandant in the eye.
The German had, despite rationing, also managed to develop diabetes. Ever since Carter had diagnosed him, he’d had to resist the urge to overdose him with insulin. As a form of murder, it was practically impossible to detect, as insulin was a natural secretion. If Carter injected between the toes, where coroners rarely checked during post-mortem, he stood a good chance of escaping discovery.
But a life, however monstrous, was still a life. And would not taking a life make Carter as immoral, as monstrous, as the Commandant?
Soulette’s injuries were fairly extensive: three broken ribs, a mangled hand, a broken nose, a mouthful of smashed teeth, and a shattered cheekbone that lent his face a lopsided squint.
Carter did what he could for the boy, setting and realigning the broken bones where possible. Against the Commandant’s instructions, he also administered a dose of morphine—if Carter was punished for this then so be it: he couldn’t stand by and watch Soulette’s agony.
But the Frenchman was stoic. ‘Are you not afraid?’ Carter asked, whispering so the guard would not report him. ‘Avez-vous peur?’
Soulette shook his head and said simply, ‘Non. J’ai servi mon pays et mon Dieu.’
By the following morning, the bruises were even more pronounced. The Commandant would be furious. Carter decided to ask for Edith’s help, hoping she might know some variety of plant-lore that would alleviate the bruising.
He felt apprehensive. They had not spoken in the months since she had seen him near the butcher’s and she must be aware, by now, of his position as the Commandant’s physician. He feared the judgment he might see in her eyes. Part of him wondered if she would come at all.
But after no more than fifteen minutes of waiting, he heard her along the corridor.
‘Take your paws off me! I’ve told you I’ll walk, thank you. I don’t need your great hams to help me along. Off me, I’ve said, unless you want to catch the pox? Riddled with it, I am. Die Pocken. Ha! Now, you’re moving!’
Despite his black mood, Carter smiled. Edith was wild-haired and sharp-eyed as usual; she looked unperturbed by the three burly men and their guns. If anything, the soldiers were shying away from her as she shook her basket of herbs and ointments at them.
Her expression changed when she saw Soulette. She marched past Carter, pushing him aside, and looked the Frenchman over, tutting. Then she stroked the boy’s hair, whispering, ‘Ma chère enfant misérable.’
She turned to the Carter, snapped, ‘Who allowed this?’
He couldn’t meet her gaze. Instead he fixed his eyes on their shoes: his were buffed and glowing, even in the dim prison light, while hers were battered and gaped at the toes. A wave of self-loathing washed over him.
Edith sighed. ‘I thought as much. Well, I’ll see what I can do. I’m making no promises, mind.’
‘Thank you.’
She clapped her hands and within minutes had somehow persuaded the sulky guards to fetch a basin of hot water, some salt, sugar and vinegar—though from where and how, Carter had no clue. Then she set about making a paste, which she smoothed liberally on to Soulette’s bruises.
She worked on his face first, holding his jaw steady with one hand while dabbing the strange concoction on with the other. Carter could see how it might work: a compound to constrict the tissues and thereby speed recovery.
But there was still a problem: ‘He needs to look…as, ah, normal as possible, so to speak. For Thursday. For…well… God, what a bloody mess.’
At first he thought Edith hadn’t heard. But then she said, still dabbing away at Soulette’s face, ‘In that basket, at the bottom, there’s some wild garlic. No, not that—those are crocus bulbs, you buffoon!’
She elbowed Carter out of the way and dug around, then drew out some long, bright green leaves, peppered with tiny white flowers that he might have mistaken for clover. She threw them at him. The smell of garlic was overwhelming.
‘Grind those up, will you? I want a smooth paste, mind—no lumps or stringy bits. There’s a pestle and mortar in the basket.’ And back she went to the Frenchman’s face.
He flinched a little when she put the compound on the broken skin on his eyebrow: vinegar and salt on an open wound must have been excruciating.
She growled, ‘Be still, will you!’ then she patted his cheek, gently. ‘Don’t worry, the pain will be gone by Friday.’
A joke in poor taste, Carter thought: by Friday, the boy would be dead. But Soulette gave a harsh bark of laughter.
It took a great deal of time to grind up the leaves and flowers into a pulpy mess, even longer before Carter had anything approaching the smooth mixture Edith had demanded. But his arm was aching, so he showed Edith.
‘I hope this will do.’
‘It will have to, I suppose.’
Then she turned to Soulette. ‘Now,’ she said, in rapid French, ‘one teaspoon every hour, morning and night. And don’t scratch the tincture, I shan’t make more.’ She gave Carter a sad smile. ‘It should take down the bruising and the swelling. Come Thursday, he’ll look good as new. From a distance.’
A fist of tension in Carter’s gut loosened. ‘Excellent. Truly, excellent. Thank you.’
Edith nodded curtly, gave the Frenchman a brief, tight embrace and kissed him on both cheeks. He clung to her. His shoulders shook and he began sobbing.
Carter remembered the bite of Father whipping him with a willow wand when he wept: the sting of the switch across his buttocks or his palms. To toughen him up, Father had said, after Carter had come home with filthy, mud-spattered hair, his school clothes clagged with mud. Some other boys had chased him and pushed him into a ditch. Father had punctuated the whipping with admonishment: ‘Next time (Crack!) turn and fight! (Crack!)’
After a long time, Edith emerged, wiping her eyes. She pushed past the guards and marched off down the corridor.
Carter had to scurry to keep up. ‘Thank you, Edith. I am most grateful. You are a good woman, you really are.’
She waved her hand to shush him. ‘Enough! It isn’t right, this whole business, you see that?’
A hot flood of shame roared at his cheeks. ‘You’re absolutely correct. It’s terrible.’
‘Disgusting.’
‘I wish I could do something.’
‘You might as well be putting lipstick on a cow b
efore it goes off to the slaughterhouse.’ She stopped walking and glared. ‘And what do you think you’re doing, letting the child be beaten half to death like that?’
‘I…I tried to stop it. But there was very little I could do.’
‘Yes, I can see you did very little.’
She scowled, while he stood and stared at his shoes again. The rich glow of leather: sunlight on autumn leaves in a land before war. He wanted to hurl the damned things into the fire.
When Edith tutted and set off walking again, he followed. How could he make her understand, without putting her in danger? He could imagine only too well her response, if she knew the Commandant had threatened her: she’d march straight to Royal Square to give him a piece of her mind.
‘You’re a good man, Doctor,’ she said. ‘So how can you stand it? Treating the Commandant? Helping him, supporting him.’
‘I’m not—’
She stopped again and held up her hand. ‘None of your rubbish now. The truth. I’ve always thought that you’re no traitor or collaborator. You’re a decent man, stuck in a tricky spot.’
He gave a humourless laugh. ‘It’s more than a tricky spot—and not simply for myself.’
What to say? He couldn’t endanger her by intimating anything of the Commandant’s threats. But he also couldn’t bear the disgust in her eyes.
He sighed. ‘I’m quite powerless, I’m afraid. Especially as he has made threats to…to close the hospital if I don’t attend to him.’
‘Indeed? Why haven’t you mentioned it?’
Carter shrugged, bitterly. ‘To you and me, it is an explanation. To others, it would simply seem an excuse.’
Edith nodded. ‘I see that. But there’s no explanation or excuse for what’s happening to that poor boy. And now you’ve dragged me into it. I feel sick to my stomach.’
She was right, of course, but she didn’t understand; it wasn’t just a case of protecting himself.
By the next day, Soulette’s contusions had faded to a jaundiced yellow and by the execution date, as Edith had promised, they had all but disappeared. His face still had an odd slant to it, but the Commandant would be satisfied.