The Things We Did for Love

by Natasha Farrant

Her voice was very low. He leant in closer to close out the noise of the room.

  ‘What did you chat about?’

  ‘Oh, you know.’ She waved her hand. ‘God things.’

  Their heads were almost touching. He swallowed. She smelt of jasmine.

  ‘Look,’ he began.

  ‘I just want . . .’

  They broke off at the same time.

  ‘You go,’ she said.

  ‘No, you first.’

  She looked around the room as if she were only just taking it in.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ he thought he heard. He braced himself for whatever she had to say, then froze when she stepped forward to take his hands in hers.

  Her skin against his was soft. He closed his eyes and felt her lips brush his cheek.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured. And then, before he could react, she was gone.

  v

  He would have followed her at once, but his mother protested.

  ‘Better wait,’ said Solange. ‘I’ll tell you exactly what to do.’

  He had never stopped to look at the old holm oak by her house before, but it was exactly as Solange had described it, growing right on the boundary of the property. Arianne’s father had refused to cut it down and over the years the garden wall had been rebuilt to incorporate it. Its lowest branch was within easy reach of the street. He grasped it and swung himself up.

  ‘Beneath the wall is the old dog pen. Don’t jump, or you’ll never get back up again, and the only way out is through the garden at the back – they lost the key to the door in the wall ages ago, though to be honest even Paul could kick it down. You have to climb from the wall on to the roof. Ari’s window is right at the end. It’s a bit slippery, but you should be all right, we’ve done it loads of times. She doesn’t have shutters up there.’

  ‘I’ll give her the shock of her life.’

  ‘She’ll love it.’

  *

  ‘You’re not much of a burglar.’

  His heart skipped a beat at the sound of her voice. He looked up to where she sat cross-legged on a flat ledge between two chimney stacks, the red glow of a cigarette between her fingers.

  ‘The racket you’re making!’ she said. ‘What on earth are you doing?’

  ‘I came to see you.’

  ‘Well, you’ve seen me now, so you’d better go.’

  He hoisted himself up to where she was sitting.

  ‘I meant it,’ she protested. ‘My life won’t be worth living if Auntie Elodie hears you.’

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

  ‘There’s a lot you don’t know about me.’ She didn’t inhale, he noticed. She saw him smile, took a more robust drag and broke into a cough.

  ‘Come.’ He stubbed the cigarette out against a tile and flicked it into the street below. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Trust me.’ He slithered down the roof back to the tree and grabbed a branch with both hands.

  ‘It’s past curfew,’ she said.

  ‘I promise we won’t get caught.’

  She edged towards the tree.

  ‘Tell me where we’re going first,’ she whispered. ‘Or I won’t come.’

  ‘Jump!’ He opened his arms. ‘I want to show you something.’

  Her hand in his, stifling laughter, they ran through the sleeping village.

  ‘This is crazy!’

  ‘Shh, keep your voice down!’

  On they ran past the village houses, along the low wall of the cemetery, past its gates and the shadows of crosses, up the lane which snaked through the woods towards the main road to Limoges.

  ‘I don’t know when I last came up here.’ Arianne was still whispering, though they had left the last chalet behind. ‘I always stop at the cemetery.’

  ‘How often do you go?’

  ‘Every Friday. Papa used to take her flowers.’

  He turned to look at her, but she didn’t look sad.

  ‘And now it’s your turn,’ he said.

  She smiled. ‘And now it’s my turn.’

  Away from the village, in a world drained of colour, the road stretched before them like a silver ribbon and the sounds of the night rang across the countryside with the clarity of church bells. An owl screeched. Its victim screamed. A brook rushed in the distance. They stopped by a gate at the top of the hill.

  ‘We go this way,’ said Luc.

  Arianne paused as she climbed over the gate, standing astride it to survey her surroundings. Behind them lay Samaroux and open country. Ahead, branches of oak and beech arched over a path, forming a tunnel which stretched into the woods.

  ‘There ought to be wolves,’ she said. ‘Or talking bears.’

  ‘Unlikely in these parts. We could probably stretch to a wild boar . . .’

  ‘You know what I mean though?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ He held out his hand. ‘Come.’

  She stopped again after a few steps to breathe in the damp air. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard such silence,’ she said. ‘Or felt so utterly alone.’

  ‘We have to hurry.’

  ‘Why won’t you tell me where we’re going?’

  ‘It’s a surprise.’

  ‘I can see,’ she remarked. ‘Almost clearly.’

  Luc grunted.

  ‘Is it night vision?’

  ‘No.’ The trees were thinning out now. He stood to one side to let her continue alone. ‘It’s the moon.’

  ‘Oh,’ breathed Arianne.

  The moon indeed. His peace offering, full and low, caught in the arch of the trees at the end of the tunnel. It shimmered over the valley, its seas and craters stark against its ripe, round shape.

  ‘How small we are,’ said Arianne at last. ‘And how beautiful it is.’

  ‘Soon it will rise higher,’ said Luc. ‘And lose the effect of the trees.’

  ‘I could almost touch it.’

  ‘That’s how I felt the first time I saw it.’

  ‘Do you often wander around at night?’

  ‘Lately, yes.’

  He had been crouching on his heels and now let himself fall back on the grass with his back against a tree. Arianne sat beside him. The moon shook itself free of the trees and floated untethered in the inky sky.

  ‘It’s like there are two worlds,’ he said at last. ‘There’s the real one, the messy one, with school and Grandfather and the Occupation. And there’s this one, where everything seems to be just right. Like time’s been suspended, and life and death and happiness and sadness are all part of the same thing. It makes me feel that this is how things were always meant to be. Beauty and cruelty. Here in the world of wolves and moons and talking bears. Does that make sense?’

  ‘Parts of it. Which world do I belong to?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She leaned forward and touched two fingers to his lips.

  ‘I’m very real,’ she said.

  He groaned and pulled her into his arms.

  She lay against him on a bed of dew-soaked grass. Neither of them noticed the dampness which seeped through their clothes and soaked their skin, or the cold air on their limbs. There was only his mouth on hers, the softness of her body against his, her hands winding round the back of his neck, drawing him closer. She bit his lip and wrapped her legs around his. He broke away to lie on his back, pulling her with him so that her head rested in the crook of his shoulder.

  ‘Stars,’ he said. ‘In the sky, I mean. As well as in my head.’

  ‘Told you I was real.’

  ‘I’m still not completely convinced.’

  *

  The sky was streaked with red by the time they returned to the village.

  ‘They won’t have missed you?’ he whispered.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. You?’

  ‘Doubt it. Mother goes to bed early. And even if she does . . .’ They had reached the wall of Arianne’s garden. She stood with her back to it, his hands against the stone on ei
ther side of her. She hooked her fingers into his belt.

  ‘What?’ she murmured.

  ‘It’s worth it,’ he whispered back.

  The church bells chimed. The village was beginning to stir.

  ‘Help me up?’

  He linked his hands together to give her a leg up and she pulled herself on to the wall.

  ‘Good night, Romeo,’ she grinned.

  She stood on the roof of her parents’ house, a slight silhouette against the pink and indigo of morning, as unreal and wonderful to him in that moment as the happiness rising within him.

  ‘You’ll fall,’ he warned.

  She laughed. He caught glimpses of her thighs as she crawled over the tiles. She turned to look back at him. A strand of hair caught in her mouth and he itched to push it aside.

  ‘Luc?’

  ‘What?’

  Somewhere in the countryside, another church bell rang. Arianne smiled

  ‘It’s Sunday morning,’ she said.

  He felt like he had wings, running home on the dirt pavement as if he were cutting through air. Arianne knelt for a while by her open window, gazing without seeing it at the morning sky. Then she crawled towards her bed and slept.

  May 1944

  i

  Samaroux was delighted to have a new source of gossip.

  ‘So,’ teased Thierry in the Café de la Paix. ‘The Lafayette wench.’

  ‘All the girls are madly jealous,’ Solange told Arianne on their way into a geography class. ‘But most of the boys don’t get it.’

  ‘I suppose I’ll see even less of you now,’ Teresa complained to Luc.

  ‘Don’t think for a minute you can let up on your schoolwork,’ threatened Elodie.

  Luc hated the gossip but Arianne didn’t care.

  ‘I feel like a different person,’ she confided in Solange. ‘Incandescent. Lit up. Happy.’

  ‘Like someone has lifted the lid on your emotions and they are all just bubbling up to the surface?’ asked Solange.

  ‘Yes!’ cried Arianne. ‘Exactly like that! How did you know?’

  ‘I read about it in one of Maman’s magazines,’ said Solange drily.

  But Luc was approaching and Arianne wasn’t listening.

  ‘Look at him,’ she sighed. ‘Isn’t he lovely?’

  It wasn’t possible to be really jealous of Arianne, thought Solange. Not if you loved her. Her happiness was too infectious. She went with them to Lascande that afternoon, and lay beside them on the lawn.

  ‘We won’t be like other people.’ Luc pointed a finger at the sky, tracing their destiny. ‘None of us. We will all be different.’

  ‘Oh really?’ laughed Solange.

  ‘How?’ asked Arianne.

  ‘We shan’t stay here for a start. We’ll travel all over the world. We’ll go everywhere, and when we’re bored we’ll just move on somewhere else.’

  ‘We’ll have pots of money,’ cried Arianne. ‘Left to us by long-lost millionaire uncles. We’ll go to Venice and have a huge motorboat and live in a palace.’

  ‘And then to New York where we’ll live in a skyscraper.’

  ‘We’ll have a castle in Hungary . . .’

  ‘A yacht in the Caribbean and an igloo in Alaska . . .’

  ‘An igloo!’

  ‘You think we’d be cold, but we wouldn’t. We’d have sleeping bags lined with fur, and a fire, and we’d rub each other’s skin with whale fat to stop us getting frostbite.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ interjected Solange. ‘Am I part of the whale-fat rubbing, or is this a private fantasy?’

  Luc blew her a kiss. Arianne laughed. Sol smiled and tilted her face towards the sun. It was the first truly hot day of the year, and the sky through their narrowed eyes was the colour of amethysts. Swallows flew high, too high to make out their cries, but they felt their hearts soar with them.

  ‘I don’t think I have ever felt happier than at this moment,’ said Arianne, but even as she said it Solange could tell that the moment had passed. Arianne rolled back over to Luc, sitting right up against him with her arms around his waist and her face pressed into his shirt.

  ‘I don’t have a long-lost uncle,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t know that,’ he murmured. ‘That’s the whole point of him being lost.’

  ‘We’ll have to take Paul with us. We can’t leave him with Auntie Elodie, no matter how annoying he is.’

  ‘He can have his own yacht,’ said Luc. ‘And Sol too, of course.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Solange smiled.

  ‘Do you really think we’ll be able to?’ asked Arianne. Luc was nuzzling her neck and she had to push him away to speak. ‘Not the yacht, I mean, but travel and go where we want and see the world?’

  ‘’Course we can. When the Germans leave.’

  ‘If they leave.’

  ‘They will. It’ll be over soon.’

  ‘People keep saying that but how can they possibly know?’

  ‘It’s all over the BBC.’

  ‘When do you listen to the BBC?’

  Luc shifted guiltily.

  ‘When?’ she repeated.

  ‘Thierry has a radio in his barn.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’ Arianne turned to Solange. ‘Did you know that?’

  Solange shrugged. ‘Put it this way, I’m not blinded by love.’

  ‘But it’s dangerous!’

  ‘Not so very.’ Luc pulled her back to him and trailed his lips along her collarbone.

  ‘I’m still here?’ said Solange.

  ‘Promise you won’t listen to it again,’ said Arianne.

  Luc’s lips moved to her earlobe.

  ‘I’m going home,’ said Solange

  They barely noticed her leave. She turned back when she reached the path. The house crouched on the edge of the lawn, hugged by the forest which hid it from Samaroux. Luc and Arianne had moved to the terrace. She sat beside him on the wall with her head on his shoulder, looking out across the countryside to where the rolling green of the hills faded to a haze of blue. The low evening sun cast its shadows around them but to Solange the boy and girl on the terrace shimmered in the evening light. In that moment before she turned for home, they looked like ghosts, ghosts who had always been there and who always would be.

  No, she wasn’t jealous. They were just too perfect.

  ii

  Sevastopol fell in the middle of May. The remains of the German Seventeenth Army in the Crimea were destroyed shortly afterwards, and 36,000 Axis troops taken prisoner. The Russians were turning now to Belorussia, and the Allies were preparing their invasion from the west.

  Spring had been and gone. Soon the heat would return, and with it mosquitoes and disease. Captain Drechsler’s men had shed their greatcoats and were restless. They knew they were losing the war. When the end came, they wanted to be near home.

  In the middle of May their wish came true. The Captain swept into the barn where they took their meals, brandishing a telegram. He’d been drinking, but they knew that this was something different. The flush was back in his cheek and the sparkle in his eye. He looked young again, and handsome.

  ‘Gather your kit, men!’ he shouted. ‘All hands on deck and at the double! We’re on our way back to the Fatherland.’

  ‘Home, Alois,’ sighed the Captain later that evening. ‘Your wife and little boy. My parents, my music. Good beer, good wine. No more of this god-awful vodka.’

  Alois Grand lit a cigarette. ‘Going straight back, are we?’ he asked.

  ‘Small redeployment in France first,’ admitted the Captain.

  ‘To fight the Americans.’

  ‘If they land.’

  ‘They’ll land. Stubborn sods, the Americans.’

  ‘Still,’ said the Captain cheerfully. ‘It’ll be good to do some proper fighting again, eh?’

  Alois exhaled a series of perfect smoke rings. ‘Between you and me, sir,’ he said, ‘I’d much rather go home.’

  iii

  Romy sat at the
terrace of the Café de la Paix after lunch one Sunday, an unopened book in his hand, gazing towards Arianne’s front door and dreaming about buying Lascande.

  He knew she loved the place. He had followed her there several times, and Paul had told him about her childhood visit with her mother. He had no idea how he was going to buy it, but he knew just how things would be once he had it. They would all live there together. His mother would be happy and keep house, and Arianne’s fearsome great-aunt would be somehow neutralised and kept in a rocking chair, and his father would have vaporised – he couldn’t quite bring himself to dream that he was dead. Arianne would sit at his feet and listen as he read out loud from his favourite books. He would play the piano for her while she sang, they would walk together in the woods and she would let him hold her hand.

  ‘We never even write to Papa any more,’ Paul had grumbled to him earlier that week. ‘That was two things you could always rely on with Arianne. Fridays she went to the cemetery, and Sundays we wrote to Papa. I could turn into Heil Hitler and she wouldn’t even notice. It’ll be the same again this Sunday, see if it isn’t. I mean I don’t care, obviously. It’s not like I enjoy writing letters. But still.’

  Sure enough, Arianne and Luc were emerging from her house. Romy threw a few coins on the table and followed at a discreet distance. They took the road out of the village and turned right when they reached the woods. Not Lascande today, then. They walked on past the old fountain and followed the brook upstream to where it widened into a pool. It was not yet late enough in the year for the sun to warm the air beneath the trees. The water was deep, the clear surface fading to amber and then to brown in the depths, reflecting the colour of the rocks. Leaves floated on the surface. Somewhere above, a cuckoo called. Romy crept closer.

  ‘Swim,’ Arianne was saying. ‘Or don’t you dare?’

  ‘I don’t see you getting in.’

  Arianne took the bait and crossed the water upstream from where Luc stood. Facing him across the pool, she slipped her feet out of her wooden clogs. Romy squirmed. She raised her arms above her head to undo the catch of her dress, twisted them to grip the zipper. She tugged, faltered, then pulled the dress over her head. Romy caught his breath.