‘Better put out the lantern,’ Madeleine said, bending to snuff out the flame. There was a whiff of kerosene.
There were no lights on at the convent, or at Saint Damian’s. Voices and cries came from the hospital. Vincent felt that he should be there. The children would be terrified. The nuns would be praying. The old folks would be battened down in their dark huts. Now and then there was the faint glow of a pitch-oil flambeaux. Fear called for light, despite the regulations. The far thunder had not come this close before.
As they rounded Point Girod they could see the harbour of Porta España on fire. There was no moon, only the clear sky of stars and the milky way. As they grew accustomed to the darkness, they could see the outline of Sancta Trinidad, and then the other islands in the archipelago, like the backs of whales.
The sky became filled with the drone of bombers over the gulf. ‘Here they come, at last!’ Jesse cried out, shouting in jubilation, leaving his oar, and crouching behind Theo in the bow, to instruct the boy in the war planes. They could hear the faint wail of sirens.
‘They’re scanning the waters for targets.’
Jesse dropped the anchor. ‘Should take a hold on the rocks. The water near the cove is shallow. We don’t want to drift out into the boca or get thrown against the rocks.’
Theo was all eyes. Still perched in the bow, looking towards the burning harbour, he kept looking round to Vincent and Jesse for reassurance. He kept an eye on Madeleine, smiling at each other.
Jesse explained in low tones what might be happening. ‘They’re looking for signs of the enemy but also for casualties. Those are anti-submarine aircraft out on the gulf, and those ships are scanning the ocean floor with their Asdic sets for submarines. I bet there’s been a U-Boat attack. Unbelievable! How could it have got through the bocas?’ Jesse sounded uncomprehending.
The GI and the boy were caught up in the excitement of the moment. Theo was still keeping an eye on Madeleine.
‘How it cross the magnetic loop?’ Theo remembered his lesson at the Look Out. The loop lay on the ocean floor, between El Caracol and the island of Huevos.
‘Yes, exactly. How could a U-Boat cross without the defences knowing?’ Jesse repeated his lesson.
Madeleine sat without saying a word. Mention of a German U-Boat alarmed her. Vincent turned to look at her. All talk of the war fired her imagination, conjured her father.
They heard its engine before they saw it, moving nearby in the darkness. They could feel the pirogue rocking because of the wake that came in from the open sea, to rock them in the cove where they were hidden. They were hammocked in the swell.
It was Theo’s young eyes. He whispered sharply, ‘Look! Something, there, moving through the water. I can hardly see it,’ he whispered. Vincent and Jesse followed the direction of his arm and the pointed finger, rigid with intent, with an accuracy with which it wanted to pin down the moving shape in the water. Madeleine crouched behind them, getting up from the stern. They were a tight group, staring into the darkness.
It was Jesse who recognised what it was. Accustomed to his watch at the Look Out, with the artillery guns trained on the sea, precisely for these targets, he recognised the conning tower, just above the dimly lit water.
‘Look like a whale,’ Theo whispered.
‘I hope those guys have got it in their sights.’ Jesse expressed the frustration of a soldier. The others watched with their own thoughts of disbelief. At first, it seemed to be coming straight at them. Then, it was making for the open ocean, through the Boca de Navios.
Escaping this way, it ran no danger of setting off signals. ‘Those bombers have lost it. Jesus Christ!’ Jesse was beside himself.
They held their breaths and watched. ‘Look, do you see him?’ It was Theo who first saw the figure, standing on the open deck below the coning tower. He was bending to fix something.
Madeleine crouched behind Vincent, staring over his shoulder. They were so close. She saw distinctly, the blond hair of the German sailor. As if from deep inside of her, she began to hear that love song she had heard that night, when she had looked from her cell at the convent, and saw the German sailor on the deck of the training ship. Instinctively she sung the words ‘Ja, ja, die Liebe ist’s allein, die Liebe, die Liebe ist’s allein. Yes, yes.’
‘Shush, please, he’ll hear.’ Jesse was biting his lip in frustration.
Madeleine felt the love song flee across the water to the blond sailor.
‘If I’d been at the Look Out, I’d have blown her out of the water.’ Jesse changed the tone.
Vincent and Theo stared at him in shock. Vincent thought of the young man swinging his saxophone through the kitchen door earlier that evening. He too had his love songs.
Madeleine went back to her seat in the stern. The drone of the U-Boat grew fainter. They were left rocking in the swell of its wake.
Jesse lost the coning tower as the submarine dived just outside the boca, safe now, in the depths of the Atlantic.
Theo looked over his shoulder to where the U-Boat had dipped away. ‘He reach the ocean,’ he said, with a big O.
Voices In The Dark
Jesse could not wait to get back to the Look Out, to make his report. ‘See you tomorrow, boy.’ Then he hurried through the house, out the back, into the darkness, into the bush.
Vincent prepared to visit Saint Damian’s, and decided he would row himself there. He did not like going out on his own, even into the bay. But he felt that if he hugged the shore closely, past the Chaplain’s house, he would be safe.
‘Theo, I want you to go to sleep now. I’ve got to go and check things at the hospital.’
‘I can’t sleep now, Doc.’
‘I want you and Madeleine to look after each other.’ As he left to go downstairs, he saw that the boy was already lying across his bed under the mosquito net, plugged into his crystal set. What a night he had had! Vincent stood for a moment at the door and watched Theo’s breathing, as he had done so many times before. He stared at his naked back with its serrated scar; a story still to be told, or maybe never to be told.
Madeleine was waiting on the jetty. She had the dinghy ready for him. It was easier to row the smaller craft than the heavy pirogue. ‘Let me come with you,’ she pleaded.
‘I need you to stay here with the boy. Would not be safe for us to arrive together in the middle of the night.’
‘But, Vincent…’
He saw her distress, the reasons for it. He was caught between his responsibility for his patients, and her need. In the past, he would have wanted nothing more than to have her at his side. ‘Madeleine, sweetheart.’ He reached out, almost capsizing the dinghy.
Their changed circumstances did not allow for Madeleine to be at the hospital with him. They both knew that. Her fear, created by the explosion, and seeing the German U-Boat with the blond sailor, recalling her earlier experience just before the war, left her terrified. She crouched, and leaned forward to take his hand. Vincent caught his balance. ‘I need you to be strong, to be here, for Theo. Go up to bed.’
‘Yes, I understand. Take care. But they’re my patients too.’
‘I know. But it’s better I go alone.’
Then he could not leave her, as he saw her eyes fill with tears. Her fear was more than she could cope with.
Vincent could see the terror on her face, hear the agitation in her voice, notice the darting of her eyes. She was overcome with her responsibility for Theo. Something that as a nurse would have seemed like routine had become overwhelming.
Then the memory, the image of the U-Boat moving through the black waters of the bocas, a hundred yards from where they were anchored, alarmed him more and he became infected with her fear.
He clambered back onto the jetty. Together, they looked out towards where more flares lit up the night sky, as the search for the U-Boat continued. In each other’s arms, standing at the edge of the jetty, they listened to the drone of the anti-submarine bombers, which were still circling the
gulf, now spreading their search further into the bocas.
‘It’s too late. They’ve escaped,’ Vincent said.
‘Who’s escaped?’
‘The Germans.’
‘What do you mean?’ She was puzzled.
‘You know?’
It was as if she had suddenly banished the incident from her mind.
The men who manned the U-Boat would be the same men who occupied her country, her France. They would be the same men who were part of her nightmare in which her father was caught. They were the same men who drove through her French village, in those dreams, in fast black Citroëns, with machine guns poking out of the windows. They were the same men on whose straining leads barking Alsatians woke her in her hut in the hills, hounds which had caught the scent of their quarry, worrying it into the thicket of her dreams, where they had gone to earth. The same men gave out the statutory yellow stars.
In one dream, she had told him, it was Marcel, with a rifle at the door, with the gendarmes. He was not hunting rabbits anymore.
How could he know the images which besieged her mind? Where did the stories come from that she told herself?
Rising out of a wood, there was a clatter of rooks. There was a line of cypresses. She and a young boy running there, in their excitement at going into the woods, found that it was peopled with others who were hiding, resisting the advance of a terrible army. She heard the tramp of their boots across the fields, down the village lane.
As Vincent, again, entered with his imagination into the nightmares of Madeleine, he saw them in her face and eyes, in her fingers scraping the wall of the jetty house, digging into the pits of the broken masonry. He put his hands over hers to stop the fury. ‘Madeleine, sweetheart.’
They stood like that, looking out to sea, in the darkness, with the flares still burning over Porta España. This was the nature of their love: passion and comfort. He comforted her.
Madeleine turned to look at him. ‘Will we be safe?’
‘I think so.’
‘You saw that man on the U-Boat before it dived?’
‘Yes, there was one, closing the hatch after him, disappearing, and then the sea closed over the deck.’
‘You saw what he looked like?’ she persisted.
‘It was difficult to see. It was dark.’
‘You know, his uniform? A naval officer’s hat? A face?’
‘No, sorry. I hardly saw him.’
‘How could you not see him? His blond hair, his blue eyes, his smile. He was the one, who sang to me beneath the window of my cell, at Embarcadère Corbeaux. Die Liebe, die Liebe ist’s allein.’
‘You want some piece of reality, some evidence, something to tell you that your dreams are true.’
‘Or not true. C’est l’amour, c’est l’amour seul.’
‘I love you.’
She looked sad and then smiled. ‘C’est l’amour seul.’
They both looked to where the flares over Porta España were now a dull glow, beyond the island of Gasparee. The drone of the bombers had stopped. The frogs pinged and the insects sung.
In that moment, with the singing night around them, with the intermittent barking of a dog, Vincent and Madeleine turned towards each other. He held her. She was close to his chest, his beating heart, his bare arms, his open shirt, his naked neck. He was close to her face, no longer cocooned in cotton. There was her face and her hands, her arms and legs as he swooped up her flimsy skirt. There were her breasts, her new body. She called it that when she came to his bed. ‘I bring you my new body.’ They did not resist the moment now, as they made for the jetty house and lay on the hard bench. He felt her heavy black hair, her soft face, released from its taut constrictions. Madeleine felt the unshaven cheek of her doctor. Their moment was hesitant, even now, and then they chose their lips. His tongue found her open mouth, his fingers the salt of her wet flower, and then they forgot where they were.
Around them, the darkness. Out there, the war. Not far away, there were sounds which came from a world that they shared in their nursing and doctoring, a child’s cry, the pain of the disfigured. Their world rearranged itself, and settled around them.
‘Let me go now. Try and sleep.’ Vincent lowered himself into the dinghy.
‘I love you.’ She watched him disappear into the darkness.
She sat at her dressing table brushing out her hair. There was a knock at the door. It was Theo. ‘Can’t you sleep? Come, sit. Tell me what you’re thinking.’
‘What you thinking? I watch you sitting, brushing your hair. You look lost.’
‘Looking at myself in the mirror, I thought how much like my mother I was becoming. I’m becoming my mother.’ She smiled at him in the mirror.
‘What you mean? You’re becoming your mother? You can’t do that. You could do that?’
‘You know what I mean. Not literally. Of course not.’ He was staring intently at her.
‘Where is your mother?’ he asked.
‘My mother? She’s in heaven.’ Then Madeleine thought she was patronising the boy. ‘She’s dead.’
Theo quickly changed the subject. ‘So what else you thinking about?’
‘I was back in the Place de la Mairie in the village of Saint Jacques de la Campagne, where we went in summer; my mother’s parents’ home. Behind the house, the village falls away into a gorge. Deep, over the flat rocks, the cold water hurtles down from the icy heights.’
‘The Alps? Snow! I learn about that.’
‘Beyond the steep gorge, above the rocky cliffs, are fields. I liked to sit and watch the sun go down on the evening from that window. The rows and rows of lavender, so purple in the light. A blue mist.’
Theo was looking at Madeleine as she brushed her hair. ‘You miss that place. You mother bury there?’
‘Yes. She’s buried there. When I was a little girl, she used to stand behind me with a brush, telling me a story, brushing out my knots.’
‘You want me to brush your hair?’
Madeleine giggled. ‘Okay, if you want to try. Don’t pull it hard.’
‘I know how to do it. Watch.’ Theo stood behind her and pulled the brush gently through Madeleine’s hair.
‘That’s good.’
‘I know how to do this thing. I used to do it so for girl I know.’
‘A girlfriend?’
‘Nah. Just a girl.’
‘Christiana? Your school friend.’
‘Not she. Not she.’
Madeleine realised her error. ‘Well, did she have a name?’ Madeleine looked at Theo behind her in the mirror.
‘Chantal.’
‘That’s a pretty name.’
‘She, yea, she pretty.’
‘You don’t sound sure.’
‘Yes, she pretty. Man!’ Then Theo seemed distracted. ‘I tired do this. Anyway, it looking good now.’
‘Okay.’ She took the brush for him.
Theo walked over to the window and peeped through the blackouts.
‘Maybe we should try and sleep now,’ Madeleine suggested.
‘I can’t sleep.’
‘I know. A lot has happened tonight.’
‘I still seeing that submarine.’
‘Try and sleep. My eyes are closing up.’ She got up from the dressing table. ‘Good night.’
‘Don’t let mosquitoes bite.’ They laughed. Theo left her room.
Eventually, Madeleine slept, but was woken suddenly by the moan of a plane. She lay back and listened to the sea in the bay, then, again, fell asleep. Once, she thought she heard footsteps on the landing outside her room.
It did not take Vincent long to row, hugging the coast, below Father Meyer’s house. He was careful not to show any light, mainly because of the military activity in the wake of the attack. He did not want the Coast Guard coming into the bay to caution him. The lap of the oars disturbed a jumbie bird. The feathery owl flapped away into the higher gommier trees off the wet branches of the sea grapes leaning into the water.
> As he approached Saint Damian’s, Vincent could see a figure standing at the end of the jetty. As he got closer, he realised it was Sister Rita. ‘Sister.’ Vincent threw the rope.
‘I’ve got it.’ The pirogue knocked the jetty, where there had been tyres to break the thud. They had all been burnt.
‘Thanks, Sister.’ Vincent heaved himself up to stand next to her. ‘You’ve obviously been alerted to the attack?’
‘Is that what it is? I woke with the explosion, and then lay awake listening for something else. There was silence in the convent, and then Mother Superior was knocking on the door of my cell. It was then that I could hear the cries coming from the hospital. Myself and Sister Marie-Paul were deployed to take the pirogue and row across the bay. There was no time to alert the boatman with the launch. Luckily, it is very calm tonight. We took it in turns to row. It can be choppy as you cross in front of La Tinta, as you know.’
Vincent watched her tell her story in a graphic, animated way, trying to control her fear. He admired these women and that confused him, because he did not believe in what they believed in, except their dedication to care and healing.
‘Yes, it seems that a German U-Boat has attacked one or more vessels in the harbour at Porta España,’ he said.
‘We could see the flares, as we came into the open bay out of La Chapelle.’ She turned and pointed to the open sea of the gulf. There was still burning like the last of a sunset.
‘Where is Sister Marie-Paul now?’ Vincent asked.
‘She’s with the children. I came down here to see if I could make out anymore about the disturbance. I’ve been up to the huts, and tried to quieten the fears of the women. I expected to see Sister Thérèse there.’
‘You know she goes to the very farthest huts. She’s got sleeping accommodation there,’ Vincent explained.
Night Calypso Page 33