The men go in and don’t come out again.
AN HOUR OR two later, I’m in my yard in front of my house, picking some herbs for a stew, when I see that the window of Les Vinaires that overlooks us is flung open. I can hear German voices through the window. I can’t tell what they’re saying—I know only a little German, just the words of some Bach cantatas, from when I was in London and used to sing in a choir. I can’t even judge the emotion from the sound of the words.
A thought slams into me—that we will be so exposed. When we are out in our yard, or if our front door is open, the Germans will hear our conversations. I wonder if they will understand us, if they speak English at all. But even if they can’t understand us, they will see what we do. We won’t be able to hide from them.
The day feels unstable, feverish. The outward things—the sigh of the wind in my pear tree, the long light of afternoon slanting into my yard—all these things are just so, just as they should be, yet it feels as though there’s something strange on the air, subtle but troubling as a faint smell of scorching, or an insect whine that’s almost too high to be heard.
I will have to move these pots that stand beside my door. I will carry them through to the back of the house and put them out on the terrace. There I’ll be able to tend them without being seen.
But I stand for a moment, irresolute. Something in me is reluctant. I hear Evelyn’s assertion in my mind: I’m not going to hide away, Vivienne. I’m hurt that you thought that I would. I’m not going to let the Hun move me about. And in that moment I make my decision. I will leave my herbs and geraniums here—leave everything just as it was. This is the only protest I can make, the only way I can fight this: to live as I have always lived, not let them change me at all.
MILLIE STARES AT the cat’s bowl of food, which hasn’t been touched.
“Where’s Alphonse?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart.”
“But it’s nearly nighttime.”
“Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’m sure he’ll turn up. Cats always find their way home.”
But Millie is unhappy, a frown penciled in on her forehead. I think, guiltily, that she’s worried because the cat was so nearly put down; she has a new sense of Alphonse’s vulnerability.
I read her a story, but she can’t sit still. She keeps jumping up and going to the kitchen, looking for him.
“It’s the Germans, isn’t it?” she says. “The Germans have taken Alphonse.”
“I don’t expect so,” I say.
“I want him back, Mummy,” she says. “And I want my ball back. Everything’s horrible.” Her face crumples up like paper and tears spill from her eyes.
I’d forgotten about the ball that she lost in the garden of Les Vinaires.
“Millie, the ball’s not a problem. I can easily buy you another one.”
She ignores this. She rubs her tears away angrily.
“Blanche says it’s the Germans. Blanche says the Germans eat people’s cats,” she tells me. Her voice is shrill with outrage.
“She was teasing you, Millie,” I tell her. “I really don’t think they do.”
But I wonder if Alphonse’s absence is in fact the Germans’ fault—remembering the young blond man and how he petted the cat. Perhaps he has put out food for him. Cats have no loyalty.
I listen to Millie’s prayers and tuck her up in bed.
“You’ve got to find him,” she tells me, sternly.
The sky through the living room window darkens, to a rich cobalt blue, then to night. There’s a silver scatter of stars, a slice-of-melon moon. Still the cat doesn’t come home. It’s well after nine o’clock now. I think about the curfew, but the blackout curtains are already drawn at Les Vinaires, and everywhere is quiet.
I decide I will go out and look for the cat. I know I can be silent, and I’m sure I won’t be seen.
My back door isn’t overlooked from the windows of Les Vinaires. I go out that way, into the yawn of a black night. I cling to the hedgebank, creep along in the shadows, edge up the lane as far as the track that leads to Les Ruettes. I don’t dare call, but I’m hoping Alphonse will hear me—or maybe sense my presence, with that strange sixth sense that cats have.
There’s a sudden engine noise behind me. It must be German soldiers, now that islanders can’t use cars. I’m suddenly very afraid, my pulse racing, a cold sweat of fear on my skin. I slip through a gap in the hedge, crouch down in the field. The headlights sweep over the hedgebank and pass. I pray they didn’t see me. Then I hear the car slow and come to a stop. It must belong to the Germans who have moved into Les Vinaires.
I creep back to my house, and close the door on the night. Relief surges through me, that at least I got home safely. Alphonse is on a chair in the kitchen, licking himself assiduously. I curse him under my breath.
I take him up to Millie. Her face shines.
But I can’t believe I did this. I think of something that the aunts who raised me were always saying to me: “Vivienne, you’re too trusting. You shouldn’t let people walk all over you. You shouldn’t be such a doormat. . . . Your soft-heartedness will get you into trouble, one of these days.” I think that perhaps they were right. I’ve been so stupid, so irresponsible, taking this risk for a cat, just because Millie was a bit unhappy.
I’M MAKING MY coffee at breakfast time when I spill a jug of milk. Anxiety must be making me clumsy. I’m on my knees on the kitchen floor, wiping up the spillage, when there’s a crunch of boots on our gravel and a rapid knock at our door.
It’s one of the men from Les Vinaires, the spare dark man with the hollow face. His uniform, his nearness, make me immediately afraid. And mixed in with the fear, I have a sense of embarrassment, that I’m in my apron, a dishcloth in my hand, that he can see into my kitchen, which is messy with wet washing hung on the rail in front of the stove. I have some inchoate sense that I am letting the side down.
“Good morning,” he says. His English is precise and measured. I can see him noticing my apron, and the pool of milk on the floor. “I’m afraid I may have come at an inconvenient time.”
I’m about to say, “That’s all right,” the automatic response to his concession. But it isn’t all right—nothing is all right. I bite my tongue to stop myself from speaking.
He puts out his hand. This shocks me. I think how they bombed the harbor when all our soldiers had gone; how they shot at the lorries so the petrol tanks would explode, when the men were sheltering under them; of Frank’s burned and bleeding body. I shake my head; I push my hands in my pockets. I can’t believe he thought I’d be willing to shake his hand.
He lowers his hand, shrugs slightly.
“I am Captain Max Richter,” he says.
A sudden fear grabs at me. He has come here because I went out after curfew. He saw me. My mouth is dry; my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth.
He makes a small imperative gesture, wanting to know my name.
“I’m Mrs. de la Mare,” I tell him.
He waits, expecting more, looking inquiringly over my shoulder into the house.
“Four of us live here—me, my daughters, and my mother-in-law,” I tell him, in answer to his unspoken question.
From my front door you can see into the living room. I notice him looking in that direction; I turn. Evelyn is in her chair, watching everything. He inclines his head, acknowledging her. She gives him a look as barbed as a fishhook, then lowers her eyes.
“And your husband?” he asks me.
“My husband is away with the army,” I say.
He nods.
“We will be your neighbors now, Mrs. de la Mare,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Now—you know the rules, I think.”
There’s a hard set to his face when he says this, his mouth thin as the slash of a razor. I find myself wishing that it had been the other officer who came, the scarred one. Thinking that perhaps he’d be less harsh than this man, and less correct and remote.
“Y
es,” I say.
“You know about the curfew.”
“Yes.”
My heart races off. I see myself being taken away, imprisoned. And my children—what will happen to my children? I still have my hands in my pockets. I dig my nails into my palms, to try to stop myself from trembling.
“We hope for a quiet life here—all of us,” he says.
“We do too. Of course.” My voice is too high, too eager. I sound naive, like a girl.
“Don’t put us in a difficult position,” he says.
“No, we won’t,” I say.
His cool, rather cynical gaze is on me. There’s something about his look that tells me he saw me in the lane.
“I’m glad we understand each other,” he says.
He lowers his hand toward his belt. Fear has me by the throat: I think he is going to take out his gun. But he pulls something out of his pocket.
“This must be yours, I think,” he says. “Perhaps it belongs to one of your girls.”
It’s the ball with colored stripes that Millie lost over the hedge. Relief undoes me, making me shaky and weak. A little mirthless, hysterical laughter bubbles up in my throat. I swallow hard.
“Oh. Well. Thank you.”
I take it. I don’t know what else to say.
“I also have daughters, Mrs. de la Mare,” he says.
There’s a brief note of yearning in his voice. This startles me.
“You must miss them,” I say, immediately. Because he does—I can tell. Then I wonder why I said that, why I was sympathetic like that. I’m cross with myself—I don’t have to make any concessions, don’t have to give him anything. I feel entirely lost: I don’t know the right way to behave.
His gaze flicks back to my face. I know he can read my confusion. Everything’s messy, all mixed up in my head—the fear I feel, the stern set of his face when he talked about the curfew; and now his kindness in bringing back the ball.
“Well, then. Good morning, Mrs. de la Mare. Remember the curfew,” he says, and turns.
I close the door rapidly. I feel exposed, in some way I couldn’t articulate or define. There are little red crescents in my palms, where I pushed my nails into my skin.
“Vivienne.” Evelyn is calling for me.
I go to her.
“The Hun came in the house,” she says. “You opened the door to the Hun.”
She’s agitated. She puts down her knitting; her crepey hands flutter like little pale birds.
“Evelyn—I couldn’t not open the door. The man’s living at Les Vinaires now.”
“Fraternizing is an ugly word. An ugly word for an ugly deed,” she tells me severely.
“Evelyn, I wasn’t fraternizing. But we have to be civil. Stay on the right side of them. They could do anything to us.”
She’s implacable.
“You’re a soldier’s wife, Vivienne. You need to show some backbone. If he comes to the door again, don’t you go letting him in.”
“No. I won’t, I promise.”
“Never let them in,” she says. Ardent. “Never let them in.” As though the maxim is something to cling to amid all the chaos of life.
She picks up her knitting. But then she puts it down again, looks vaguely in my direction. There’s a sudden confusion in her face, a blurring like smoke in her eyes.
“Tell me who that was again—the man who came to the door? Who did you say he was, Vivienne?”
I can’t face repeating everything.
“It was one of our neighbors,” I tell her.
“Oh. You and your neighbors.”
She takes up her knitting again.
Chapter 11
AS DARKNESS FALLS, I go out into the yard to take some vegetable peelings to the compost heap. I pause for a moment, breathing in the night air, all the sweet mingled scents that bleed from the throats of the flowers. I can smell the flowering stocks in the borders in my back garden, and the perfume of my tobacco plants, which always seems richer at night. The sky is profound, the shadows are long, everything turning to blue. From the Blancs Bois, where the entangled trees are drawing darkness to them, I hear the call of an owl—shivery, like a lost soul haunting the wood: unworldly.
There’s a table lamp lit in the kitchen of Les Vinaires, and the blackout curtains aren’t drawn yet. Lamplight spills across the gravel of my yard, leaching the colors from everything it falls on, so the petals of the geraniums in the pots beside my door are a sickly amber, without brightness. I look in at the window, see the man who is sitting there, at Connie’s kitchen table. He’s in his shirtsleeves, he has his top shirt button undone. At first glance I think it’s Captain Richter, who came to our kitchen door, but then I see it’s the other man, the scarred one. The lamplight falls on him, illumines one side of his face. I can see his scar quite clearly, the jagged line of it, the pink frail tissue that doesn’t match the rest of his skin. He seems different from when he came in the jeep, sitting there alone in the light of the lamp—pensive, less authoritative.
As I watch, he pushes up his cuffs—mechanically, not thinking about what he’s doing. His mind is somewhere else entirely. He’s reading something—a book, a letter; I can’t see what it is, the table is just below the level of the windowsill. I think it must be a letter: only a letter could hold him as this does—for whatever it is, it takes all of his attention. Some new expression flickers over his face: there’s something there that displeases him. He frowns; he runs his finger abstractedly over his brow. I think, This is how he looks when he’s concentrating. Blue smoke from a cigarette resting in an ashtray wraps around him and softly curls and spirals in front of his face. He’s alone, and I know he feels alone. He is utterly unaware of me watching him. He has the look of a man who doesn’t know he is looked at.
I feel a sudden curiosity about his other life—the life he has when he isn’t being a soldier. His home, the people who matter to him. I wonder what it is like for him to be here—with all around him the unfamiliar island night. Landscapes are most themselves, most separate from us, at night. Even to me, who have lived so long in this secluded valley, the Guernsey night can feel a little alien—the cry of the owl so lonely, the dark so dense and deep. I wonder about him—where he comes from, what he longs for. Is he a little homesick, as I was when I first came here? It’s a word we use so lightly, but I think of what I learned then—that homesickness is a true sickness, a longing like grief, for what has been lost or taken away. I can still feel it from time to time, just a trace of that yearning: it comes with a memory of lamplight, of pavements under rain, of the scorched smell of the Underground—all the scents and sounds of London, its humming sultry energy. I wonder what he longs for.
I stand there watching him. I will him to look up, to look out the window at me. It’s like a child’s game, as though I could make him see me, as though he is my puppet. I have the power now, in this moment—just the tiniest sliver of power. Because I am looking in on him, and he doesn’t know, doesn’t see me.
But he doesn’t move, doesn’t stir, his eyes are on what he is reading. I slip back into the house. I feel troubled, but in a way I couldn’t put into words. As though things are not quite as I thought they were.
I go to bed, but for a long time I can’t sleep.
Chapter 12
MY MOTHER DIED when I was three. I remember how we were taken into her bedroom to say good-bye—me and Iris, my big sister. The room smelled wrong. Her bedroom had always had a scent of the rosewater she wore, but now it held the harsh, sore-throat smell of disinfectant. And my mother looked strange, somehow blurred, as though her face was made of wax and had started to melt. I was a little frightened of her. I wanted to leave the room, to be anywhere else but there. She gripped my hand too tightly, and she was crying, and I didn’t like that.
I don’t remember much from the weeks and months that followed, except that for the funeral I had to wear a stiff black dress that was made of some itchy fabric, and people told me off for scratching. Aft
er my mother’s death I was mute for a while, simply refusing to speak at all—or so I’ve been told. I don’t remember much at all from those times. Except for the music box that was mine to keep, which I would play for hours, the music perfumed with memories of her. And there are little images in my head of the house where we lived, off Clapham Common, at 11 Evington Road—a tall, thin, rambling house that was never quite asleep, that would go on settling and creaking all through the night; and the hidden, enclosed garden with whispery, overhanging trees and the leaves of years piled up under them; and the aunts who looked after us, Auntie Maud and Auntie Aggie, who were kind but weren’t my mother, so when they combed my hair it hurt. I always remember that—how they pulled too hard at the tangles, not gently easing out the knots as my mother had done.
I was a nervous, frightened child, frightened of so many things: thunderstorms, and the edges of railway platforms; spiders, even the tiny ones that ran all over the terrace at the back of the house, and, crushed, left a smear like a blood stain; afraid above all of the dark. I was always afraid of the dark. Once Iris and I were playing teacher and pupil. I was five, just a little older than Millie is now, and Iris was the teacher. She was very strict and stern, and she decided I’d been bad and locked me in the coal shed. It was a concrete shed, no windows, the door close-fitting to keep the coal dry—not even a thread of light from under the door. I remember the darkness, sudden and absolute, the fear that broke over me like nausea, the rapid panicky skittering of my heart. It was so dark I thought at first I had my eyes shut—that they’d been stuck shut somehow—and I put up my hand and found my eyes were open; I could feel the bristly fluttering of my eyelashes. I learned in that moment that there are different darknesses. That there is ordinary darkness, like the night in the countryside, where, even on a night with no moon, as you stare things loom, take form; and there is another darkness, a dark so profound you cannot begin to imagine it, cannot conjure it up in your mind. A darkness that blots out all you remember or hope for. A darkness that teaches that all that consoles you is false.
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