The Beekeeper's Promise

by Fiona Valpy

  And then they began to have to manoeuvre the car around other vehicles that had been dumped in the middle of the road when they’d run out of fuel, there being no more to be found anywhere along the route. In the end, inevitably, their car also ran empty and they had to abandon it. Mireille’s friend, the car’s owner, said he would walk back to a garage they’d passed a few kilometres previously, where it had looked as if there might be a chance of some fuel. ‘You two take the baby and start to walk. Orléans isn’t too much further. When you get there, see if you can find a room for the night in the main square – there are cafés and hotels there. I’ll come and find you once I’ve got the car on the road again.’

  And so Mireille and Esther, carrying Blanche, had joined the slow-moving flood of people making their terrified, weary way south.

  ‘Did you find somewhere to stay in Orléans?’ asked Eliane.

  Mireille shook her head. ‘No chance. Everywhere was full. People were barricading their doors against looters and chasing refugees out of their gardens where they were scavenging for something to eat. It was as if a swarm of locusts had swept through the countryside before us, taking everything, and that’s how the locals saw us too. We slept that night under a hedge, holding the baby between us to keep her warm. Esther tried to feed her, but her milk was drying up and anyway Blanche is already being weaned on to solids so she was hungry for more. We begged a little bread from another family the next morning and soaked it in some water for her. But otherwise there was nothing to eat – the locusts had got there first.’

  Their mother Lisette brought in a bowl of chicken broth on a tray, balancing Blanche on her other hip. The baby was already looking a little better-nourished, having been fed sips of goat’s milk and some of the broth too.

  ‘Eat, Mireille,’ Lisette ordered. ‘We need to get you back on your feet so that you can help look after this pretty little one, don’t we, my sweet?’ She placed a kiss on top of the baby’s dark curls.

  After she’d sipped the broth and managed to swallow a bite or two of bread, Mireille went on with her story.

  They’d rejoined the frightened and weary procession and continued on their way southwards and westwards, reasoning that it would be better to keep moving forwards, towards the hoped-for safety of Coulliac, than to wait there, where there was nothing to eat and no shelter, in the hope that their friend would turn up with the car again.

  ‘A situation like that shows people in their true colours,’ Mireille commented as she paused to take a sip of water from a glass beside her bed. ‘Some people behaved with the most extraordinary compassion and generosity, like the family who’d shared their bread with us that morning. But others displayed selfishness, envy and malice. I suppose they were terrified, as we all were, and just desperate to survive.’

  They’d been on a stretch of road somewhere around Tours, Mireille thought, although she’d lost track of the distance they’d covered, with progress so slow and so haphazard. They’d tried taking by-roads, which weren’t quite as crowded, but ended up losing their bearings and so had found the main arterial road once again, where it ran alongside a railway line. ‘Someone said they thought it was the main line to Bordeaux, so we knew we were heading in the right direction,’ said Mireille.

  The midday sun had been beating down and they had sat in the shade of a plane tree to rest and give Blanche some shelter. She had been crying with hunger for more than an hour now. Esther had tried again to feed her, but the baby just grew angrier and more frustrated as she attempted, unsuccessfully, to suckle at her mother’s breast. Exhausted, Esther had handed Blanche to Mireille and done up the buttons of her blouse. ‘Here, see if you can calm her down a little. I’ll go and ask around in case anyone can spare something for her to eat.’

  Esther had limped back into the road and Mireille had begun to sing to Blanche, rocking her.

  And then there had been a shrill, high-pitched scream. Mireille had looked up, bewildered, to see who was making the noise and for what reason. The scream went on and on. As if in slow motion, she saw that all the other refugees on the road were also looking around, equally bewildered, trying to pinpoint the source of the noise.

  Then, one by one, they raised their faces to the sky. ‘Like a field of sunflowers – that was what I thought in that moment,’ said Mireille, unable to suppress a sob. She took a deep breath and then went on. ‘It was an aeroplane. A German one. It made that terrible screaming sound as it dived. And then the noise became something worse. A rattling hail of bullets and screams and groans from people standing in the road. A woman just in front of me looked into my eyes and saw that I was gazing, in horror, at the blood that was spreading across the front of her dress. It was only when she looked down and saw it herself that she folded in half and fell at my feet. I turned and held Blanche tight between me and the trunk of the tree, with my back to the road. The pilot came back twice more, and each time there was that horrible screaming sound as he dived again and then the sound of the guns. I couldn’t breathe until the noise of the plane had gone completely. And when I did breathe, I could smell the dust. And then the blood.’

  Mireille’s eyes were dry as she recounted the final part of her story – because the sight she’d seen when she’d turned around was too terrible for mere tears. Her voice, as she went on with her telling, had become a hard monotone.

  ‘I stumbled over the people who’d walked past me just moments before, slipping in their blood, which covered the road. Most of them didn’t move, but one or two reached out, begging for help. But I knew there were others who could try to help them and I had to find Esther. I called her name again and again. I was holding Blanche tight but she cried inconsolably, as if she already knew her mother was gone. Then I saw a piece of the blouse that Esther was wearing. It was the same blouse that she’d just re-buttoned in those moments before the attack, and yet that now seemed such an age ago. The blouse wasn’t white now, though. It was soaked with blood. Her blood. From her wounds. Where the bullets had hit her in the chest.’

  Mireille stopped there, unable to find any more words. But Lisette and Eliane needed no further explanation. They could read the shock and trauma written across Mireille’s face, in the way her normally strong features had collapsed and dissolved into an expression of complete helplessness, and in the pain that was lodged deep in her dark eyes.

  Lisette passed the now-sleeping baby gently to Eliane and gathered Mireille into her arms. ‘Hush now, hush now,’ Lisette soothed, as she rocked her daughter, weeping the tears that Mireille could not.

  Abi: 2017

  From the window of my attic bedroom in the mill house, I can see the moonlight playing through the branches of the willow tree, its leaves cascading like silvered tears into the deep pool below the weir. I pull the shutters to, although they don’t close properly as the iron catch is broken, hanging loose where the screws are missing, letting moths and mosquitoes slip through. Thank goodness for the netting draped over my bed, which protects me in the night, letting me sleep deeply as their wings whirr harmlessly in the background.

  From the lamp beside my bed, a circle of golden light pools on the floorboards, which exhale their faint scent of beeswax, letting it mingle with the fragrant posy of lavender and white roses that I brought back with me from the château today. Jean-Marc had appeared with it just as I was leaving. He offered it to me with a shy smile. ‘I thought a few flowers might cheer up your room down there,’ he said, with a nod of his head towards the valley below. He’d been at the mill house earlier, helping Thomas put up some plasterboard in what was going to be the new kitchen.

  As I gaze around my bedroom, I can picture Mireille lying in her single bed at one end of the room, with Eliane and Lisette trying to comfort her after the ordeal of her journey home from Paris when the war broke out in earnest.

  Sara had told me that, in her traumatised state, Mireille had lost the ability to cry.

  I did, too, eventually. But in the early days of my marr
iage, I cried a great deal: a river of silver tears.

  After the first year, I grew to know the pattern of Zac’s behaviour as surely as I knew the London weather. I could watch the clouds from behind the vast sheet of wall-to-ceiling glass in Zac’s loft apartment in the docklands – (it never felt like our apartment, always his) – as they gathered over the Thames beyond the cityscape of tower blocks, sweeping towards us from the west, just as I could sense the change in atmosphere between us, see his anger building, towering over me like a dark storm cloud, threatening. Waiting . . . Then breaking.

  Like that first Christmas we spent together. I was determined to make it all perfect, playing at home-making as I’d always longed to do. Together, we drew up a list of the people we would send cards to. They were mostly Zac’s friends and family, but I added a few of my own friends as well as the families I’d worked for. Together, we chose the cards, although Zac told me that the ones I preferred were either too mawkish or naff and so we settled on a selection of tasteful images painted by Old Masters. He left me to write them, and I took such a pride in including a little personal message in each and in signing them from the two of us. Each time I wrote our names, it was a public affirmation that we were officially a couple now.

  Zac came in just as I was writing the last few to add to the pile of neatly addressed envelopes that I would take to the post office tomorrow, so that they’d reach their destinations in good time for Christmas. He came to look over my shoulder. ‘Love from Abi and Zac,’ I wrote and then I turned to kiss him. But his face had grown blank, the non-expression that I’d begun to recognise as the precursor to something much worse.

  He reached over me, and I remember I’d automatically flinched as his hand came down. But he didn’t touch me then; he just leaned forward and picked up the card I’d been writing, a frown creasing his forehead.

  ‘How many have you done like this?’ he asked, the anger already making his voice sound as cold as the winter rain that ran in runnels down the windows, blurring the city lights beyond like tears.

  ‘Like what, Zac? I don’t understand . . .’

  ‘Like this.’ He drew his finger over our names, making the ink smudge slightly where it hadn’t quite dried. ‘“Abi and Zac”.’

  I’d glanced at him, wondering if it was a trick question, but he was shaking with rage now. Quickly, I dropped my gaze to the patterned rug beneath the glass-topped coffee table, fixing my attention on its grey, geometric design as if the logic of it could keep me safe.

  He picked up the pile of envelopes and began ripping them open, wrenching out the cards to read them and then throwing each one on to the floor as he spat the words, ‘“Abi and Zac” . . . “Abi and Zac” . . .’

  He grabbed my arm then and pulled me to my feet. ‘You never, ever put your name before mine.’ He hissed the words into my face and I had to resist the urge to wipe the droplets of spit from my skin, knowing that would make him even angrier. ‘You stupid girl. What a waste of my money. Now we’re going to have to buy a whole load more cards and you’re going to write them again, this time with our names in the right order.’

  A and Z. I hadn’t even thought about it, I’d just written our names like that because it sounded right in my head. I should have thought. Stupid girl.

  The rain beat on the glass and the lights were blurred against the backdrop of the cloud-darkened sky.

  The bruises on my arms were like storm clouds too, purple and black beneath the sleeves of my shirt. But eventually I knew they would fade to the sickly yellow of a London sunset and then they could be disguised with a bit of concealer. The dark, angry clouds would go and Zac’s eyes would be as clear as a blue summer sky again and he would hold me and say that he loved me, that the anger was my fault, again, but that he forgave me. And I would try to relax, to let my clenched fists uncurl, but I was always tense, waiting . . .

  I grew more and more isolated, shut in behind the glass of those vast windows in that oh-so-desirable London apartment, cut off from the world outside.

  Eliane: 1940

  The notice, with its stark black swastika emblazoned top and centre, was posted outside the mairie in Coulliac and word passed quickly from neighbour to neighbour throughout the community.

  By order of the new administration, all inhabitants of the commune of Coulliac are to present themselves at the mairie for the purposes of registration of the population and the issuing of identity cards, which are to be carried at all times. Henceforth, anyone found not to be in possession of the necessary documentation will be arrested and may be deported.

  It was shocking to see the signature of the mayor – their elected representative – at the bottom of the notice. Many people grumbled that he had so readily capitulated to the demands of the invaders, but those who had access to a wireless or newspaper pointed out that it was now official policy, adopted throughout the occupied zone. What choice did he have? What choice did any of them have, for that matter?

  The Martin family arrived after breakfast the next morning to find that a long queue already wound around the small square at the heart of the village, and they took their places at the end of it. Local people continued to arrive at a far faster rate than those leaving the mairie, and the place quickly filled. Ordinarily such a gathering, for a market or a fête, would have had a lighthearted atmosphere; a cacophony of laughter and neighbourly chatter would have reverberated from the walls of the shops that lined the square and bounced off the balconies and shuttered windows overhead. But today the crowd was subdued and ill at ease. People addressed one another quietly, if at all, muttering greetings and asking one another in hushed tones what this could all be about. The atmosphere of occupation was oppressive. Most of those standing in the queue kept their eyes fixed on the ground in order not to have to look at the red, white and black flag that had replaced the French tricolour on the mairie’s flagpole, and so that they wouldn’t catch the eye of either of the German soldiers who stood on each side of the entrance with guns slung over their shoulders.

  As they shuffled slowly forwards, Eliane recognised Stéphanie in the line just ahead of them. She smiled when Stéphanie looked around and noticed her, and was rewarded with a cool nod of acknowledgement in return. And then Eliane caught sight of Francine, who had just emerged from the mairie. She held her new ID card in her hand. She was reading it as she came down the steps, with a bemused expression on her face. As she passed, her attention still fixed on the document, Eliane reached out and tugged at her sleeve. Francine’s features relaxed into a smile at the sight of her friend, and she embraced Eliane warmly.

  ‘What is it like in there?’ Eliane asked softly.

  ‘Strange,’ Francine quietly replied. ‘There are more soldiers, with guns, who are supervising the mayor and his secretary. There are forms to fill in, asking all sorts of questions – who you are, where you’re from, who your parents are and your grandparents, your address, your date of birth and your religion. And then this is what they give you.’ She held out her card for Eliane to see.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Eliane pointed to the large letter ‘J’ that had been stamped across Francine’s ID card.

  ‘I wasn’t sure at first. I noticed not everyone had a letter stamped on theirs, so I asked the mayor’s secretary on the way out. She says they’ve been instructed to stamp the cards of anyone who’s Jewish.’

  ‘But why?’

  Francine shook her head, still keeping her voice low. ‘I’m not exactly sure. But I certainly don’t think it’s a good sign.’ She paused and turned to Lisette, who was holding Blanche. ‘Is this the baby you told me about? Comme elle est mignonne!’ She moved closer to embrace the older woman; and as she did so, Eliane noticed that Francine whispered something in Lisette’s ear.

  Raising her voice a little, so that all those queuing nearby could hear what she said, Francine exclaimed, ‘How sad that your husband’s cousin and his wife were killed in the bombing, Madame Martin. But it’s lucky that you were a
ble to take their baby in. I can’t think of a better household in which she should grow up. I’m sure your cousin would have been relieved to know his daughter is with members of the family.’

  Lisette nodded, then found her voice. ‘Yes, it certainly was lucky that our Mireille was able to find Blanche in Paris and bring her to us in Coulliac. Imagine having another baby in the family at my age, though!’

  On hearing this exchange, Gustave looked a little startled, but Lisette gave him a reassuring smile. ‘I’m sure we’ll adapt to being new parents, won’t we, chéri? After all, family is family.’

  It took Eliane a moment or two to register why Francine had said this, but then she realised the significance of what her friend had just done for their family and for Blanche.

  All around them in the queue, people smiled sympathetically and nodded their support. Although Stéphanie, who had also been listening to the conversation, shot a piercing glance at the baby in Lisette’s arms and then scowled with her usual bad grace.

  Francine hugged Eliane once again, taking her leave. ‘Now that the bridge is closed, the mayor is going to allow a market to be held here in Coulliac instead of Sainte-Foy.’ She pointed towards another notice pinned to the board outside the mairie. ‘So I’ll see you on Saturday as usual then? Have you got that new batch of honey ready?’

  Eliane’s grey eyes were filled with a mixture of sorrow and love as she squeezed Francine’s hand tightly and bid her farewell until the weekend.

  When Lisette explained that all the family’s papers had been destroyed in the bombing, it hadn’t taken much persuasion for the harassed and over-worked mayor to issue an ID card for Blanche with her surname given as ‘Martin’. The baby’s birth certificate, which Esther had put in the little bag of belongings that she’d packed so hastily when she and Mireille fled from the city, had been surreptitiously removed from the bundle of papers that Gustave had been holding, and thrust deep into the pocket of his overalls. When they returned to the mill house, Lisette had taken it and carefully smoothed out the creases, folding it into quarters and tucking it into the pages of her heavy book of herbal remedies, which sat on a shelf in the kitchen.