by Fiona Valpy
He’d ruffled Freddie’s hair (carefully avoiding a strand of spaghetti that had somehow ended up there), and then held out a hand to me. ‘Zac Howes; pleased to meet you.’
I juggled the bowl and fork, wiped my sticky fingers on my jeans and then returned his handshake. ‘I’m Abi. The nanny.’
His blue eyes, which had looked a bit cold to me at first glance, suddenly crinkled with amusement and I realised he was actually breathtakingly good-looking.
‘I see, Abi-the-Nanny, what an interesting surname you have.’ He grinned and in my confusion I dropped the bowl of spaghetti on to the floor. Freddie clapped his chubby hands and crowed his approval, picking up a wayward strand of cold pasta and flinging it down by way of his own contribution to the general mayhem.
‘Here,’ said Zac, ‘let me get that. You deal with this young reprobate before he trashes the joint.’
Freddie’s mother, who wasn’t proving to be one of my favourite employers, clicked in on her kitten heels. ‘What on earth’s going on here, Abi? What’s all this mess?’ she snapped, before noticing Zac, who was on his hands and knees scooping spag bol off the polished sandstone tiles. Her tone altered immediately. ‘Oh Freddie, I hope you haven’t been a naughty boy! Abi will take you upstairs for your nice bath.’ She made sure she stayed well beyond the reach of her little boy, clearly not wanting to risk getting any of the bolognaise sauce on her pale-pink yummy-mummy jeans. ‘Now, Zac, you shouldn’t be doing that. Let me get you a drink. Leave it and Abi will sort it out later.’
He shot me a sympathetic glance. Freddie flung his sticky paws around my neck and planted a big, sloppy, spag-bol-flavoured kiss on my nose. ‘Come on then, Freddo Frog,’ I smiled. ‘Let’s see if there are any crocodiles in the bath tonight.’
I glanced back over my shoulder as I carried my small charge upstairs. Zac was still watching me appraisingly.
And at the time, if I thought about it for more than a moment, I put it down to the way the light was hitting his face, but from that distance the warmth seemed to have seeped out of those blue eyes of his again.
Eliane: 1939
It was with a sense of numb disbelief that Eliane trudged up the track to her work at the château on the first Monday morning in September. The afternoon before – a golden Sunday afternoon – she and Mathieu had been sitting on the riverbank watching the damselflies dance above the water. It was that moment in the day when the setting sun’s rays caught the surface at just the right angle to bounce off again, like stones skimming the river’s surface. For a brief spell, the water shimmered with golden light that was reflected back up into the overhanging trees, an alchemy that transformed their leaves into a treasure trove of shimmering gilt.
As suddenly as it had arrived, the moment passed. The angle of the light changed and the colours faded as dusk began to draw its veil over the river. Mathieu stood and then reached out a hand to Eliane, helping her get to her feet.
The peace was shattered, all at once, by the sound of bicycle tyres skidding in the dust, sending a hail of pebbles scattering against the side of the barn. Yves leaped from the bike, leaning it against the wall in such haste that it immediately clattered on to the ground in a heap. Not stopping to right it, he sprinted towards the house.
‘Eliane! Mathieu!’ he shouted when he caught sight of the couple standing beside the willow tree. ‘It’s war! We’re at war with Germany.’
Eliane felt a chill sweep her body at his words and she shivered, despite the warmth of the evening. She had hoped so hard and for so long that her sense of foreboding would turn out to be misplaced. But in truth, she’d known that this moment would arrive and a great sadness engulfed her. Instinctively, she reached for Mathieu’s hand and held on fast. His powerful grip reassured her and strength seemed to flow into her from him. She knew she needed to stay calm, to resist the panic that was rising in her chest, so that she could support her family and her community through whatever was coming.
At Château Bellevue that next morning, Madame Boin was in such a state of distress that she burned the brioche for Monsieur le Comte’s breakfast not just once but twice. Eliane sought refuge in the walled garden, checking her beehives and gathering ingredients for the day’s meals. She added a good handful of lemon-verbena leaves to her basket, knowing that their calming properties might help to soothe Madame Boin’s jangled nerves.
Monsieur le Comte spent much of the day ensconced in his library, listening to the wireless. Eliane heard snatches of the news as she brought him his meals. French troops were being deployed along the eastern front, creating what they hoped would be an impenetrable line that would defend France’s borders. Great Britain had joined the mass of Allied Forces too and would be lending their considerable firepower to the fight.
The count tried his best to reassure her, saying, ‘Don’t worry, Eliane. Our army will soon have them on the run, especially with help from our neighbours. And luckily your young man is a farmer, so he won’t be called up – we’re going to need to keep production up to feed the country while the war lasts.’
But there was a forced confidence in the way he said this, which didn’t quite manage to camouflage the dread that flickered in his eyes as he turned back to listen to the next bulletin.
At first, it seemed to Eliane that the country waited with bated breath for the war to begin in earnest. As she took the last of the summer’s honey from her beehives, she looked out from her hilltop perch to scan the sky above the walled garden for signs of enemy aircraft. But all was peaceful and she could see the inhabitants of the village of Coulliac in the valley below going about their daily business. As autumn turned to winter, life continued much as it always had done.
Mireille came home for Christmas and Eliane was grateful for her sister’s presence, which went some way towards filling the gap left by Mathieu, who had returned to spend a week with his father and brother in Tulle.
At the mill house, the family were preparing their usual Christmas feast. Mireille turned the handle of the mincer as Eliane fed in morsels of home-raised pork, seasoning the minced meat well, before the sisters wrapped patties of it in a lattice of caul as fine as lace to make the tasty crépinettes that would be fried and served at the start of the meal. Lisette was preparing the capon for the oven, and before long the house began to fill with delicious smells of roasting meat.
‘I wish you would reconsider, Mireille,’ said Lisette, as she scooped potato peelings into a bucket for feeding to the hens later. She was worried about her elder daughter continuing to work in Paris now that the country was officially at war with Germany. But Mireille dismissed her concerns.
‘Honestly, Maman, life goes on the same as ever. Our wealthy clients are still ordering couture; the cafés and shops are all open and it’s business as usual. They’re calling this the drôle de guerre – it’s a joke as nothing at all is happening. Perhaps the Nazis realise they’ve gone far enough and will begin to think again.’
That winter was a bitterly harsh one – the coldest in living memory for even the most elderly inhabitants of Coulliac. On a day in early January, when the surface of the river had frozen as hard as iron and the weir had become a sheet of pure white ice, Gustave went to the barn to start up the truck and warm the engine. It was time to drive Mireille to the station now that her holiday had come to an end.
Lisette could scarcely bear to let her elder daughter go. ‘Take care of yourself, Mireille, won’t you?’
‘Don’t worry, Maman. I’ll be fine. You know I love my work – and besides, what would I do if I came back here? Sewing curtains and letting out waistbands would bore me rigid.’
She turned to hug Eliane. ‘Look after them all for me,’ she murmured and Eliane nodded.
After Mireille had left, Eliane walked up the hill to check the beehives and smiled when she saw how the bees were keeping their queen warm by clustering together around her and shivering their bodies to generate heat. As she put extra supplies of sugar into the hives to g
ive the bees the extra energy they’d need to see the colonies through until spring arrived once more, she said to herself, Perhaps the weather has frozen the war and not just the land. Glancing northwards, she spared a thought for the soldiers who held the Maginot Line, defending France against the possibility of a German attack, and as she did so the chilblains on her own toes burned and itched in sympathy with them.
Abi: 2017
‘So that’s your first wedding out of the way,’ Sara says. It was a successful one, by all accounts, even though one of the bridesmaids had overdone the pre-event Prosecco while helping the bride get ready and had tumbled, spectacularly, down the main staircase when making her grand entrance. Luckily, she’d been at the front of the bevy of bridesmaids preceding the bride and so hadn’t taken anyone else out on her way down. Equally luckily, she’d been in such a relaxed state when she fell, that – apart from a few nasty bruises and a rip in the skirt of her dress – she hadn’t done any serious damage to herself. Karen and Sara had helped her into the library, where they’d laid her on a sofa in the recovery position with a bucket beside her head, and I’d sat with her for a while until she’d suddenly come to. Hearing the strains of the party coming from the barn, she’d tottered off to join the dancing, once I’d made her drink a large glass of water and pinned together the tear in her dress as best I could. I’d had a quick word with Karen and she went to tell her husband, Didier, who was behind the bar, not to serve the girl anything alcoholic for the rest of the evening. She’d appeared for breakfast the next morning wearing a large pair of sunglasses but apparently none the worse for her tumble.
Sara and I are cleaning windows, which are thrown open to allow the fresh air to erase the lingering smells of perfume and aftershave left by the bedrooms’ recently departed inhabitants. The warm breeze replaces the harsher, chemical odours with the heavenly scent of the wisteria, whose trailing clusters of flowers drip from the pergola covering the terrace beneath where we’re working.
‘How are you finding the work?’ Sara asks.
I polish the last smudges off the pane of glass I’ve been cleaning. ‘I love it. I don’t think I’m quite ready to face a whole crowd yet, but I’m fine doing the behind-the-scenes stuff, if that suits you and Karen.’
She nods, wringing out a cloth into a bucket of soapy water. ‘Don’t worry – we’re not going to chuck you in at the deep end straight away. Take your time. You seem to be picking everything up really quickly and it’s a great help to us all having you here. Now, if you give the mirror and tiles in the bathroom a polish, I’ll start next door.’
I try to finish the job as quickly as I can so that I can catch up with Sara and ask her to tell me more of the story of Eliane, the girl who, like me, once lived in the mill house and worked at the château. As I clean, I catch sight of my reflection in the mirror. My cheeks are still sunken and the bruised-looking skin beneath my eyes appears even darker in the bright overhead light. But there’s also a faint flush of colour across my cheekbones and my collarbones don’t stick out quite as sharply as they did before. The regular meals of fresh, hearty food, which I’ve been helping to prepare and serve up three times a day, are doing me good. As I rub the glass vigorously to make it shine – the energy that Sara and Karen bring to their work is catching – I notice that my suntanned arms are shaped with a new, muscular definition. I like the new-found feeling of strength this gives me.
At the end of each day, once supper has been cleared away, I walk down the hill to the mill house and sit for a while beneath the sheltering canopy of the willow tree, watching the darkened river flow quietly by. Those moments of utter peace are balm for my soul and soothe away the tension in my body and the anxiety in my head, which I’ve carried with me everywhere I go for so many years. When I climb the wooden stairs to my attic room at night, my muscles ache with the satisfying tiredness of physical labour rather than the shooting pains of chronic stress. And then, lying beneath the veil of the mosquito netting, softly lit by moonbeams, I drift into a calmer, deeper sleep than I’ve known for a very long time, kept company by the murmuring of the river and the softly hooted conversation of the owls in the trees along the riverbank.
Only once in the past week have I woken in the darkness gasping for breath, shaken by one of the nightmares that used to surface every night. I’d panicked even more when I couldn’t think where I was for a few moments. But then the fluting song of a bird called me back, reminding me that I was safe beneath my veil of netting and that I’d survived another night with dawn about to break.
And it’s funny, but the more Sara tells me of Eliane’s story, the more I seem to feel the ghost of her comforting presence, too, calming me and watching over me in the attic room.
Eliane: 1940
The anti-climactic Drôle de guerre or ‘Phoney War’ continued as – at last – the bitter winter gave way to spring. In April, the plum and cherry trees burst into exuberant clouds of white blossom and the bees resumed their busy to-ing and fro-ing, as the colonies in each of the hives began their annual expansion. Eliane loved to watch the way the returning worker bees would weave their dance steps to tell their comrades where they had found the best sources of nectar. Observing closely, she noticed the way the dancing changed as the fruit trees began to drop their flowers like falling snow and the acacias donned their own snowy draperies for May Day. This was a critical time for the first collection of the year: in a few weeks, she would take the combs filled with pure acacia-flower honey and extract their sweet harvest, which was as pale and clear as champagne.
In the fields, a foam of meadowsweet and ox-eye daisies hid shy purple orchids. But the bees knew they were there and they danced their coded minuets to tell their co-workers where to drink from the secret caches of precious pollen and nectar.
Mathieu was kept busy in the vineyard, ploughing between the vines to keep the weeds down and tying in the burgeoning shoots as they reached out along the trellis of wires that in the fullness of time would support the heavy bunches of grapes. But in any spare moment he had he would walk over to the mill house to see Eliane. On the first day of May, the traditional workers’ holiday, he arrived bearing a newspaper parcel of wild mâche, which he’d gathered among the vines, and a bunch of lily-of-the-valley. Half of the flowers he presented, wordlessly, to Lisette, and he gave the rest to Eliane.
Lisette lifted the sprigs to her face to inhale their sweet scent. ‘Ah, les muguets,’ she sighed. ‘Thank you, Mathieu, I’m sure they will bring us luck.’
It was a beautiful day outside and Eliane had packed a picnic into her wicker basket. She and Mathieu picked their way across the weir and then wandered a little way along the riverbank on the far side. Mathieu spread a rug in the shade of a wild cherry tree that grew at the side of the meadow and lay down alongside Eliane as she set out the things for their lunch. He stretched his strong limbs, enjoying the unaccustomed midweek rest and the sensation of the sunlight dappling through the leaves. He squinted up into the branches and smiled. ‘It’s going to be a good year for the fruit.’ He pointed upwards and she glanced at the clustered bunches of green cherries that were just beginning to blush with colour here and there where the sun’s ripening rays brushed them.
She nodded and passed him a hunk of bread spread with home-made pâté. ‘An exceptionally good year. The bees have been busy. I think they’re making up for lost time after such a long, hard winter.’
After they’d eaten, Mathieu sat with his back against the trunk of the tree and Eliane lay on the rug, resting her head on his thigh, which was as broad and comfortable as a bolster. He plucked a stem of grass and began to plait it, his thick fingers surprisingly nimble and precise.
‘According to Monsieur le Comte . . .’ she began, but he gently pressed a finger against her lips to stop her.
‘No talk about the war today, please, Eliane. It’s a holiday, remember? So let’s take a holiday from that as well.’
She smiled up at him, gazing into his wide
brown eyes until his mouth curved upwards into the generous smile that he reserved mostly for her. She closed her fingers around his hand and kissed it. And then he took her hand into both of his, the smile fading as his expression grew more serious.
‘Eliane . . .’ he began, but then had to stop and clear his throat. She stayed silent, still gazing up at his face, waiting. He went on, ‘You know we’ve talked about our future together, and that we can’t really make plans until I’ve finished my training as a vigneron and can find a permanent placement somewhere . . . And things have been a bit uncertain with this idiotic war – which, after all, we’re not going to talk about today . . .’ He lost the train of his thoughts for a moment and she remained still, quietly looking up at him with her clear grey eyes that both reassured him and at the same time caused such a confusion of emotions to rise up within him. ‘What I mean to say is – because I’ve never exactly asked you – well, not in so many words . . .’ She smiled and kissed his hands again, giving him the confidence to go on.
‘Eliane, I want to marry you!’ He blurted the words out suddenly, and his brow creased into lines of anxiety as he awaited her reply.
‘Well, Mathieu,’ she replied calmly, ‘that’s a very good thing indeed. Because I want to marry you too.’
His features relaxed then, into a smile as big as his heart. He took the plaited grass and tied it carefully around the fourth finger of the hand he held. ‘One day it will be a proper ring, I promise.’
‘That promise is worth more than any ring ever could be, my Mathieu.’
They stayed on the far bank of the river as the golden May Day afternoon wore on, in a world where only the two of them existed.
And then, just ten days after that picnic on the riverbank, the voices coming through the wireless in the library up at the château became shriller and more strident, transmitting a new sense of panic, as the news came through that the German army was launching concerted attacks on the Netherlands, Luxembourg and then Belgium. The Panzer divisions, supported from the air by the Luftwaffe, moved inexorably westwards towards the French border.