“Stay there,” I tell her.
I go to grab Blanche’s arm.
“Mum. What on earth are you doing?”
“We’re going back home,” I tell her.
“Mum.” Her voice is splintered with panic. “We’ll lose our place in the queue.”
“We’re going home,” I say again.
“But, Mum—you said we had to go now, or we couldn’t go at all.” Her eyes are wide, afraid.
Millie tries to pick up her carpet bag, but she’s only holding one handle. The bag falls open and all her things tumble out: her knickers and liberty bodices, her candy-stripe pajamas, her beloved rag doll—all her possessions, intimate, lollipop-bright, spewing out all over the grubby stone of the pier. She starts to cry, shuddery, noisy sobs. She’s frightened and cross, and ashamed that she made the things spill.
“Shut up, Millie. You’re such a crybaby,” says Blanche.
Millie, outraged, sobs more loudly. There’s a slight cold drizzle of rain.
I gather up Millie’s things and try to brush the dirt off them. Everyone’s eyes are on us.
“Mum, you can’t do this,” hisses Blanche, in an intense whisper. She’s torn—desperate to make me listen, yet mortified at being involved in such a public scene. “We’ve got to get to England.”
“The boat’s too small. It isn’t safe,” I say.
The rain comes on more heavily. Rainwater soaks my hair, runs down my part, runs down my face like tears.
“But nothing’s safe anymore,” she says.
I have nothing to say to that.
“And I want to go. I want to go to London.” Her voice is shrill. “You said we were going to go. You said.”
I’m trying to gather up Millie’s things.
“Blanche, for God’s sake, just grow up. This isn’t all about you. Can’t you think of somebody else for once?”
Immediately I’ve said it, I regret it. I shouldn’t have told her off like that. I have snatched her dream away from her: I know she’s upset, and afraid. But the words hang between us, sharp as blades, and I can’t take them back.
I straighten up, put my hand on her shoulder. She shakes me off and stands a little aside, as though she is nothing to do with us. Her face is a papier-mâché mask: it’s set and white and looks about to dissolve.
I usher the girls past the queue of people. I don’t know how to get home, I haven’t thought this through, haven’t thought beyond this moment—just wanting to turn my back on the boat, the journey, the treacherous heave and shine of the sea.
We walk along the Esplanade, heading away from the pier. I don’t know if there are any buses going to St. Pierre du Bois. Maybe all the buses are busy bringing the children here, to the harbor. The mist and rain are blowing in so you can’t see far over the water, the horizon edging nearer, everything closing in, closing down. They’ll have a wet, choppy crossing.
And then, with a rush of relief, I see a vehicle I recognize: it’s Angie’s brother, Jack Bisson, in his ramshackle van. Jack works as a handyman; like Angie, he’s resourceful, he can fix anything—burst pipes, loose slates, a cow that’s struggling to calve. I wave, and he comes to a stop beside us and winds his window down.
“We were going to go and then we decided not to,” I say.
“She decided not to,” Blanche mutters behind me. “Not us. Her.”
Jack has quick dark eyes like a sparrow and Angie’s warm wide smile. His birdlike gaze flits over us. He nods, accepting what I’ve said.
“Mr. Bisson—I know it’s an awful lot to ask—but I don’t suppose you’re going our way? You couldn’t give us a lift?”
“Of course I could do that, Mrs. de la Mare. Just you hop in,” he tells us.
He drops us in the lane just above Le Colombier.
Chapter 6
ALL I CAN think is how much I want to get home.
We come to the wide five-bar gate that opens into our yard. The gate is unfastened. I must have left it like that—not noticing that I hadn’t fastened it in our rush to leave. But I’m surprised I was so careless.
I go to the door: it’s half ajar. I feel my pulse skittering off.
“What’s the matter, Mummy?” says Millie.
“I’m not sure. You two can wait out here for a moment,” I tell them.
“Why?” says Blanche. “It’s our home. And it’s raining, Mum, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Just do as you’re told,” I say.
Blanche flinches.
I step cautiously into the passage, then into the kitchen. Fear rushes through me. Someone has broken into our house. My kitchen is wrecked, the cupboard doors flung open, my pottery jars broken, flour and raisins and biscuits all over the floor.
“Hello?”
My shrill voice echoes.
I stand silently for a moment and listen for running footsteps, my heart thudding. But the house has an empty, frail stillness: whoever did this has gone. I step warily into the living room. All my precious music is scattered, the sheets of paper like white petals from some great blossoming tree that a wind has shaken. The cabinet is open, and they’ve taken some of the china, and the Staffordshire dogs and the eggcups from the mantelpiece have gone.
The girls come cautiously into the house to find me.
“No.” Blanche’s voice is freighted with tears. “I told you, Mum. We did the wrong thing. We should never have come back,” she says.
“The Germans are thieves,” says Millie severely. “I hate them.”
“This wasn’t the Germans,” I tell her. “The Germans haven’t come.” I only just manage not to add yet. I swallow down the word.
“It was the Germans,” says Millie. It’s so simple for her. “They’re robbers. They’ve taken our china dogs. They shouldn’t have.”
“No, sweetheart. It must have been someone who lives around here who did this.”
There’s the crunch of something broken, splintering under my feet. I kneel, pick up a china shard. It’s from one of the flowered teacups I brought all the way from London, that I always kept for best and only used for Sunday tea, because I was scared they might get damaged. Now I see I was wrong. I should have made the most of the flowery cups while I could.
“I bet it was Bernie Dorey,” says Blanche. “I’ve seen him and his gang around here sometimes. He was in the same class as me at school, his family are all horrible. He used to nick my satchel and he never brushed his teeth.”
“We don’t know who it was,” I say.
The thought appalls me—that somebody was just waiting for us to leave, watching the house and scheming and taking their chance. Seeking a way to profit from the anarchy of war. And I’m upset by the destructiveness of it, all the spilt flour and the breakage, as though it was just a game to them.
Blanche is seized with anger—that nothing has happened as she dreamed it.
“You see, Mum? I was right, we should have gone to England. We could be on the boat by now. We could be sailing.” Her eyes are hard as blue flints. “It’s going to be awful here. Worse than ever,” she says.
“We’ll be all right, sweetheart,” I say. “It doesn’t matter that much. We can manage without the china dogs, and the silver eggcups were such a nuisance to clean. At least they haven’t taken our books. . . .”
“So why do you sound so unhappy, Mummy?” says Millie.
I don’t say anything.
Blanche rips off her winter coat and flings it onto a chair. She stares down at herself, at the hem of her taffeta dress, which is crumpled and dark with rainwater.
“Look. It’s all ruined,” she says.
Her eyes are shiny with tears.
“Blanche—your dress will be fine. We’ll hang it up so it doesn’t crease. It’s only water,” I say.
But I know she isn’t talking only about the taffeta frock.
I go upstairs and look around, in the girls’ bedrooms, and Evelyn’s, and mine. Nothing has been disturbed here; it looks as though the
burglars didn’t come this far. But I have to be certain. Le Colombier is a big old rambling house, a labyrinth. The many people who have lived here have built onto it over the years: there are rooms leading into one another, twisty passages, places where you could hide. I hunt around everywhere—open up all the cupboards, explore all the secrets and hidden ways of my house. I climb right up to the attics, to the big front attic we use as a spare bedroom, and the little one at the back, which you reach by a separate stair. All is as it should be. At last I come down to the girls again and send them off to unpack their bags.
I clear up the mess, the shards of china crunching under my feet. A feeling like grief washes through me, and not only because of the things that are broken or lost. This doesn’t feel like our home now: it feels wrong, smells wrong, in that indefinable way of a place where someone unwelcome has been. Everything is falling apart—all the intricate warp and weft of the peaceful life we have lived here, everything unraveling. They haven’t come yet, but it has already begun.
Chapter 7
I PUT TOGETHER A meal with some food that hasn’t been touched by the burglars—a loaf of bread I forgot to throw out and a tin of corned beef.
After we’ve eaten, I walk up to Les Ruettes to bring Evelyn back home. Millie comes with me. The rain has stopped and the sky is starting to clear. There are still great banks of cloud that look as solid as far countries, but now between the heaps of cloud, there are depths and reaches of blue. The hedgebanks are drenched, and the air is rich with musky, polleny scents—wild garlic, wet earth, violets. I breathe in gratefully.
As we near the door of Les Ruettes, Alphonse slinks out from behind a greenhouse and circles around Millie, arching, purring resonantly.
Frank le Brocq comes to the door, a cigarette clamped between his lips. He’s wearing his checked cloth cap; he takes it off when he sees me. A splinter of amusement floats in his eye.
“Cold feet?” he says.
“Yes. You could put it like that.”
There’s something shameful about returning like this. It feels like an act of cowardice—not a reasoned decision, more a failure of nerve.
He takes a long drag on his cigarette and looks me up and down, in his appraising way that I don’t quite like.
“That cat of yours wouldn’t settle,” he tells me. “He kept going back to your house. Cats are like that, cats are territorial creatures. A bit like you lot.” He grins.
Millie picks up Alphonse and wraps her arms around him.
“Did you miss me?” she says.
The cat rubs his head extravagantly against her.
“Look, Mummy, look, he knows what I’m saying. He really missed me,” she says.
Frank stands aside, and we go into the kitchen. Angie is kneading dough on her table; she greets us with a smile. Evelyn is on the settle where I left her, still sitting upright on the edge of the seat.
“Vivienne.” There’s a puzzled look on Evelyn’s face, as though her life is a knotted tangle she can’t begin to undo. “Well, you didn’t take long.”
“We changed our minds,” I say. “We didn’t go on the boat.”
“Least said, soonest mended,” she says.
I feel a little surge of unease. She often gives me this feeling now—that the things she says sound normal, yet somehow they don’t quite make sense.
I turn to Angie.
“Thank you so much.”
“Don’t you worry, Vivienne. I was more than glad to help out. . . . Let’s hope you made the right decision,” she adds, a little doubtfully.
I feel that I owe her some explanation, after everything that she has done for me. “The thing is—it was such a little boat. And it’s such a long way. . . .”
We walk back slowly down the lane. I take Evelyn’s arm to help her. A bird calls with a sound like a pot being scraped, and the moist air is cool on our skin.
Millie tries to carry Alphonse, but the cat wriggles down and scampers off through the fields, heading for Le Colombier. Millie slips her hand in mine.
“I’m glad we came back home,” she says, her voice fat with contentment. “I didn’t really want to go. It’s nice here, isn’t it, Mummy?”
“Yes, sweetheart.”
But even as I say it, a little tremor goes through me. Above us the clouds retreat, regroup, creating new shapes in the sky—new countries, new islands.
Chapter 8
ON FRIDAY I cycle up to town.
The streets are empty because so many people have gone, and some of the shops are boarded up, but otherwise St. Peter Port feels much the same as always—calm and orderly in the warm June sunshine—as though the panic of the evacuation hadn’t happened at all. I buy a lamb joint, and stock up on coffee and cigarettes and tea. Such luxuries may become rather harder to buy—when they come, when it happens.
I come to Martel’s watch and clock shop, where Blanche’s friend Celeste has been working since she left school. I glance in through the window, wondering whether she’s gone, and she sees me and waves vigorously, her glossy dark curls dancing. I feel so happy for Blanche because her friend will still be here. In Grand Pollet, I pass the music shop that belonged to Nathan Isaacs; this is one of the shuttered shops. Nathan left a while ago, before the fall of France, saying that he could see which way the wind was blowing, a rueful smile on his clever, diffident face—talking about it so lightly. I miss him. We grew friendly because of the shop, where I’d often go to buy music. He was a good musician, a violinist, and sometimes I’d play duets with him at one of his music evenings, up at Acacia Villa, his tall, graceful house on the hill.
I go to the library, where I choose a new Elizabeth Goudge, and then on to the haberdasher’s to buy more wool for Evelyn. I can’t get her balaclavas and gloves to the forces anymore, but at least the knitting keeps her occupied. And I stop off at Boots on the High Street to buy a first lipstick for Blanche—wanting to give her a bit of glamour, something to make her happier, now I have snatched her dream of London from her.
I like chemists’ shops. I walk slowly down the aisle, past opulent silver compacts that I could never afford, moving through drifts of perfume—lavender water, and Devon Violets talcum powder, and all the lavish gorgeousness of Chanel No. 5.
The Yardley counter is right at the back of the shop. From here the land slopes steeply, and through the high arched windows you look down over russet-tiled roofs and out across the harbor. You can see the little boats bobbing, and all the glimmery blue dazzle of the sky and sea. Seagulls wheel and cry in the clear air. The day is mellowing now toward evening, the sunlight turning gold. The tomato lorries are parked in a line on the pier—there are still boats to take the crop to the mainland, though I don’t suppose this will happen for many more days. Way above the harbor, in the splendor of the sky, I notice two tiny black specks—a couple of planes that are flying there, very high, very far. They look innocuous as birds.
I stare at all the Yardley lipsticks, not knowing which color to choose—maybe the rose-pink, maybe the peach. The simplest choices seem hard now, after all my hesitation about whether or not we should leave—as though I have somehow lost faith in my power to decide. In the end I choose the coral because it will match Blanche’s taffeta dress. Then I head back down the High Street; I have left my bike against a wall in the lower part of the road.
“Vivienne! It is you!” I feel a warm hand on my arm. “I called you but you didn’t turn. You looked like you were off in a dream.”
I spin around. It’s Gwen.
She smiles, a little triumphant, as though I am something she has achieved. Her gaze—chestnut-brown, vivid, shining—rests on my face. Her frock has a pattern of polka dots and little scarlet flowers. It’s so good to see her I’d like to put my arms around her.
“I didn’t know if you’d gone or not,” she says. “It was all so sudden, wasn’t it? Having to choose?” She dumps her heavy bag of shopping down on the pavement, rubs a sore shoulder. “So you’ve decided to stick it
out?”
I nod.
“Cold feet, at the last moment,” I tell her. “A bit pathetic really.”
She puts her hand on my arm again.
“I’m so glad, though, Vivienne,” she tells me. “I’m just so glad you’re still here.”
Her warmth is so welcome.
“Look—are you in a rush?” she says.
“Not at all.”
“We’ll have tea then?”
“I’d love to.”
We have a favorite tea shop—Mrs. du Barry’s on the High Street. We take the table we always choose—the table right at the back that has a wide view over the harbor. There’s a crisp starched tablecloth and marigolds in a glass vase; the marigolds have a thin, peppery scent. The shop is almost empty, except for an elderly couple talking in slow, hushed voices, and a woman with eyes smudged with tiredness and a baby in her arms. As she sips her tea, the woman rests her cheek against the baby’s head. I feel a surge of nostalgia, remembering the sensation of a baby’s head against you—how fragile it feels where the bones haven’t fused, and how hot and scented and sweet.
“Gwen—how did you decide?” I ask.
“Ernie wouldn’t leave,” she tells me. Gwen and Ernie live at Elm Tree Farm, in Torteval. They have a big granite farmhouse and a lot of fertile land. “Not after all those years of work. I’m damned if I’ll let them take it all away from me, he said.”
“Well, good for him.”
Her bright face seems to cloud over. She pushes back her hair. A haze of anxiety hangs about her.
“How can you ever know what the right thing is? How can you ever know?” she says.
“You can’t. I keep wondering too. Whether I’ve made an awful mistake. . . .”
“Johnnie can’t bear it, of course, being stuck here, kicking his heels. Poor kid. He simply can’t bear that he was too young to join up.”
“I can imagine that. How he would feel that.”
I think of her younger son, Johnnie—how impulsive he is, how he’d yearn for action. I’ve always been fond of Johnnie, with his exuberance, his wild brown hair, his restless, clever hands. He and Blanche would play together a lot when they were small—making mud pies and flower soup, or building dens in the Blancs Bois—until, at seven or eight, as children will, they went their separate ways. Then I taught him piano for a while, though he often forgot to bring the right music, and scarcely practiced at all. Until he discovered a talent for ragtime, which I could never play. He had the rhythm in him, and there was no stopping him.
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