Usually we go straight upstairs. But in the passage, he pulls me to him, forgetting where we are. His kiss is urgent, as though he wants to hide himself in me; he tastes of drink, his skin is clammy. I’m desperate to get him up to my room. I pull him toward the stairway, worried that he will stumble and that Blanche or Millie will wake.
In my room, I lock the door, turn to face him, afraid.
“What is it? What’s happened?”
My first thought is for Hermann, his son. I feel a fear that chills me through—that something has happened to Hermann.
He doesn’t answer at once. He pulls off his jacket, his belt. He sits on my bed, takes off his boots, his gestures heavy, slow, a frown deeply carved in his forehead.
“The Führer has declared war on Russia,” he says.
His voice is freighted with significance, as though he expects me to grasp at once all the many things that flow from that. But I don’t know the meaning of this news—for the war, or for him, or for me.
He moves his hand across his face—uncertainly, as though his own features are unfamiliar to him. He looks up at me then, that unnatural, glittery brightness in his eyes.
“We had hoped it would be over soon.” His voice a little slurred. “But what happens now? I don’t know . . . Max says we will lose the war now.”
“Max says that?” I’m amazed.
“Max says what the hell he likes. Max believes in no one. Max has never believed that those in charge know what they are doing,” he says.
“But why—why does this mean that Germany will lose the war?” I say.
“The war in Europe goes well for us,” he says. As though he’s unaware of the abyss between us, when he says this. “It is the act of a madman to open another front in the East. And Russia . . .” He shakes his head, as though there are no words that can express what he means. “Russia has defeated many armies,” he says.
“Oh,” I say.
To me, all this seems so far away—another planet. Russia is fabulous, violent—almost savage, remote: the tsar and his family slaughtered; Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky; the gorgeous colored cupolas of St. Basil’s in Red Square. I think as so often how little I know about the wider world.
“They say you cannot imagine the vastness of it,” he says. He moves his hand vaguely, as though helpless to suggest that vastness. “Cornfields and then more cornfields, on and on, to the horizon, and then more cornfields beyond that. And forests, endless forests and swamps. And Russia’s armies are limitless. And in Russia, they have winter. . . .”
I tell myself I should be glad, because Max has said that the Germans will lose the war. This should make me hopeful. But Gunther’s news has filled me with dread, and I don’t know what this means.
Chapter 44
IN SEPTEMBER, MILLIE starts school, at St. Peter’s up in the parish square.
She wears her blue Viyella dress, which has tucks around the bodice that I will let out as she grows, and her pigtails are tied with red ribbon. Her bar shoes used to belong to Blanche, but I’ve polished them till they look new.
The playground is full of children, the ones who are starting today pressed up against their mothers, the older ones milling around, playing marbles or hopscotch or jacks. Some girls are doing handstands against the wall of the school, their full skirts billowing out like the petals of overblown flowers. I remember how Blanche cried and protested when first she went to school, how she was terrified of the playground, not wanting to let go of me, so I had to peel her fingers like Band-Aids from my hands, but Millie just looks back at me briefly and then walks boldly forward, stepping out into the stream of her future in the shiny bar shoes.
The house feels different without her. Even when she was quiet I always knew she was there, as though the air was charged by her vivid, purposeful presence. I keep busy; I get through my tasks much quicker than I did when she was at home. I scrub my kitchen till it gleams, I pick the last of my runner beans, I bottle the plums from my plum tree. They’re good fruit for bottling—Victorias. They keep their rich rose color even when they’re cooked, and all day my kitchen is fragrant with their winey, opulent scent. I’m pleased with what I’ve achieved, but I miss her.
At home time, I wait outside the school with all the other mothers. I know a few of these women from when Blanche started school, though that was ten years ago now—some of them have big families, or a gap between children, like me. There’s Susan Gallienne, tall and slender and stylish: she has a classy pallor and her hair is cleverly waved. There’s Vera Hill, who runs her household with army-camp precision; a bracing scent of carbolic soap hangs about her. There’s Gladys Le Tissier, who has six children, and an air of being always slightly distracted, as though everything happens too quickly for her. We greet one another, share our news, promise that we’ll meet up.
The school doors open, the children spill out. Millie comes running up to me, flushed, rather dazed by all the newness of everything. One of her ribbons has come undone and is flying out like a little flag as she runs. I bend to hug her. She smells of school—of wax crayons, chalk dust, apples. The smell fills me with nostalgia—for best friends and playground conspiracies, for skipping games and whispered secrets and fingers smudged with ink. All the school things.
“Sweetheart. Did you have a nice day?”
She nods vigorously.
“I was good,” she tells me. “But Simon had to stand in the corner. Miss Delaney made him. He put a wriggly worm down Annie Gallienne’s blouse.”
“Simon Duquemin?”
“Yes,” she says. “Simon Duquemin.” She rolls the name around her mouth, as though it tastes especially good, like a stolen caramel. “Simon is seven.” As if this were a major achievement and worthy of respect.
The next day, as we walk home from school, she talks about Simon again.
“Simon got the slipper,” she tells me.
I remember Blanche talking about the slipper. It’s not really a slipper at all, but an old plimsoll that Miss Delaney keeps in the drawer of her desk. She beats the children with it if they’re very badly behaved. All the children are afraid of it.
“But, Millie, it’s only the second day of term. I thought you’d all still be on your best behavior.”
“He had to bend over the desk,” she says. “He said it didn’t hurt him, but I think it did. I think he was trying not to cry.”
The countryside is mellowing with September, autumn’s gold gloss on everything. The first bright leaves are falling and rustling on the tarmac. They sound like stealthy footsteps in the quiet of the lane.
“So what did Simon do to deserve the slipper?” I ask.
“He was very naughty,” she tells me. “He was sitting behind Maisie Guerin, and he stuck the end of Maisie’s pigtail in his bottle of ink.” Again, there’s that thread of respect in her voice. “Mummy, I want to play with Simon.”
This worries me: Simon Duquemin sounds a little wild. But Millie is insistent.
The next morning, I speak to Ruthie Duquemin as we wait in the playground. I know her only by sight. She’s a pale, rather anxious woman, with a mist of fair hair around her head and eyes of a startling clear green, like the hart’s-tongue fern in the hedgebank.
“I was wondering, would Simon like to come and play with Millie after school?”
Her smile is spacious and kind.
“Yes, I know he’d love to,” she says. “He seems very taken with Millie.”
SIMON KNOCKS AT our door. He has white arms blotched with freckles, and his mother’s exuberant hair, and a suspicious expression. He peers past me into the passageway.
“I’ve come for her,” he says.
Millie has changed out of her school clothes into her oldest frock. She takes an old satchel of Blanche’s. I’ve put a jam jar in it, with string tied around it for fishing, and an apple to eat. As I say good-bye, it’s as though her feet won’t keep still: she hops from one foot to the other like a dancer. Her eyes are sunlight on water.
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“Don’t go too far. And be sure to come back before dark.”
My words fall into silence. They’re over the lane already, and through the orchard and into the wood, their clear voices trailing like bright streamers behind them.
I tidy my kitchen. I stack up the Kilner jars full of plums on the larder floor. It’s good to see all that abundance, the heavy glass jars that are filled with rose-red fruit. I wash my kitchen floor, though it doesn’t really need it. As the tree shadows lengthen and reach like grasping hands across the lane, anxiety creeps up on me and I long to have her safe at home with me. It’s the first time she’s ever played out.
But well before teatime, Simon brings Millie back to our door and heads off up the lane to his house. Millie bursts into the living room, where I am doing the darning and Blanche is brushing her hair. Millie is muddy, disheveled, pink with happiness.
“Simon climbed to the top of a tree,” she says.
“Boys are such show-offs,” says Blanche, pausing in her hairbrushing. She’s counting the strokes, bent forward, her bright blond hair hanging down; each day she tries to do a hundred strokes before bed.
“Well, I hope he didn’t expect you to climb up there as well,” I say to Millie.
“He was looking for an old wood pigeon’s nest,” she tells me. “I was meant to catch him if he fell out. And then we made a den in the wood. We were hiding from bombs. The bombs killed everyone but they didn’t hit us. . . . And then we were soldiers,” she says.
She shoots a pretend gun at Blanche.
“Honestly, Millie. Girls don’t shoot. You ought to know that,” says Blanche.
She straightens, swings her hair back over her head. She looks at herself in the mirror over the mantel, posing a little. Light shimmers on the river of her hair.
“Simon really likes me,” says Millie, boastful. “Simon says I’m really not like a girl at all.” As though this is the highest praise.
After that, Simon plays with Millie most days after school.
ONE EVENING, SHE comes home tense and breathless and thrilled.
“We made an army camp in Mr. Mahy’s barn,” she says.
Peter Mahy’s barn is just beyond my orchard, on the track through the fields that I took when I went to Les Brehauts. He doesn’t keep it well, he scarcely ever goes to it: he stores his old farm machinery there, now he can’t get the spare parts. There’s a rickety ladder to the hayloft, where the children could climb and fall through.
“You must be very careful when you play there. You mustn’t play on the tractor. And you mustn’t go in the hayloft,” I say.
“We were very careful, Mummy.”
“You’re all out of breath,” I tell her.
“That’s because we got chased,” she says.
“Chased, Millie? Who chased you?”
“Mr. Mahy’s dog,” she says. “His dog is very nasty. We went back past the farmhouse and he chased us up the lane.”
I know the dog—he’s a big Alsatian, rather bad-tempered. This worries me.
“What were you doing, to make him chase you?” I say.
“Simon threw a stone at him.”
“No, Millie. That’s a very bad thing to do.”
“Simon isn’t bad. It was a very little stone.”
“He shouldn’t have done that,” I say.
“It was little as a leaf,” she says. “It was really, really tiny. Like this.”
She holds her finger and thumb together: between them, just the smallest sliver of air.
“I don’t care how little it was,” I say.
I feel a niggle of doubt: there’s a streak of wildness in Simon, something that makes him just not care what adults tell him to do. I worry what he could lead her into.
“You must never do that again, either of you,” I tell her.
“I didn’t do anything. I promise, Mummy,” she says.
Chapter 45
WITH MILLIE AT school, I have a little more freedom, though I don’t like leaving Evelyn on her own for very long.
One afternoon in November, I cycle up to town. I buy bread and meat and onion sets, and change my library book. I manage to find a few balls of knitting wool for Evelyn, and I buy some powdered carravita from Carr’s in the arcade; it’s made from seaweed and you can use it as a gelling agent. The Press had a recipe for a jam that you can make from turnips. It didn’t sound very inviting, but I thought I would give it a try.
As I cycle homeward up the hill, I pass Acacia Villa, where Nathan Isaacs used to live, where I’d sometimes go to music evenings, before he went on the boat. I remember those evenings: a little opulent claret to drink, a fine fire burning in the grate; playing Beethoven’s “Spring Sonata” for violin and piano. He especially loved Beethoven. He was a wonderful violinist, a much better musician than me; and there’s something about the violin—the silken flow of it, the way it soars and sings—that can make the piano seem a little pedestrian. I wonder how Nathan is now. He said his cousin’s house in Highgate was rather full of relatives: I hope it isn’t too boisterous for him; I hope he has a room where he can play his violin. The villa always looked elegant, a shiny lion brass door knocker on the green-painted front door, the front lawn sleek, with flower borders. But it’s grown shabby, run-down, without him. The flower beds are a tangle of docks and dying blond grasses, and the brown-paper heads on the hydrangeas rustle and lisp in the wind. The salt air pushes my hair from my face, and a sudden sadness clutches at me, for the way the world is changing, so much torn, uncared for, destroyed.
As I pass the front door, two men come out. I can tell they’re not island people. They’re thin, and their clothes are ragged, and they’re speaking a language that’s strange to me—not German, which I recognize now. They look rather desolate and lost, their shadows falling in front of them, jagged and thin as winter branches. I can tell that they’re shivering. Today you need a good woolen coat, with the wind that whips off the sea. It’s unnerving, to hear this unknown language on our island. I wonder who they are, why they’re here, in this place so far from their home.
The light thickens so early now: it’s getting dark already. Seagulls cry. Winter is coming.
THAT NIGHT, WHEN Gunther is with me, when we lie together in the peace of my bed, I ask about the men I saw.
“There were some people in St. Peter Port. In a house called Acacia Villa, where I used to visit, before . . . You know, before all this. . . . They were foreign—not island people. Not German. They looked really thin and they didn’t have warm enough clothes.”
Something tenses in him when I say that; I see a little hardening in the muscles around his mouth.
“The Führer wants to fortify these islands,” he tells me, carefully. “He is very proud of his conquest. The fortifications are nothing to do with us.”
“What d’you mean, they’re nothing to do with you?”
“It’s a different organization—the Organisation Todt. They’re bringing workers in to build defenses around the islands.”
“Bringing them in from where?” I think of the language I didn’t recognize.
“Holland, Belgium, some of them. Some are from Poland and Russia. They’re prisoners of war or volunteers. Some are building camps to live in. . . . Don’t worry about it,” he tells me, smoothing my hair from my face. “Let’s leave the war outside. Let it be just you and me here.”
But later, in the darkness, he abruptly starts awake. His sudden movement wakes me too. He trembles, and the trembling passes into my body. He must have been stalked by some fear in his sleep, some night terror. I’ve blown my candles out, but the moonlight leaks through my curtains and falls on his face, on his eyes. He stares at me, but seems to be looking through me, as though he doesn’t see me. The sweat on his forehead gleams in the chalky light of the moon. He frightens me.
I stroke his arm, trying to bring him back to the present.
“Gunther. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Everything’s all right. This i
s Vivienne. My darling, you’re here with me, remember?”
He stares.
“Gunther . . .”
His face shifts.
“Oh,” he says. “Oh. Vivienne.”
He rubs his hand over his face, becomes himself again.
I wonder what he saw in his dream. But he doesn’t tell me, and I don’t ask.
I WALK HOME from Angie’s through the darkening evening. The sepia air is still; no wind—a thing that rarely happens on Guernsey; a single brown leaf traces out slow spirals as it falls. The world feels empty, hollow, and the shadows are purple as damsons. A sadness seems to come on the countryside with the fall of the dusk. Above the pale earth and the black trees the sky is the dark blue of ashes.
I move through the intricate long shadows of the poplars in the hedgebank, past the land that belongs to the Renoufs. I see that Joseph Renouf has put up a scarecrow in his field that stands in a pool of damson shadow. It’s cleverly constructed, made of scraps of wood and twigs, and dressed in tattered castoffs. My footsteps are loud and echoey in the silence of the lane. There’s a cold smell of night coming.
I walk on. But something about the sight disturbs me—something that doesn’t make sense. A shiver of leaves behind me makes me suddenly turn. Fear fingers the back of my neck: the scarecrow has moved to a different place in the field. All the little hairs stand up on my skin. I can see the scarecrow’s face now—I see that he is a man. I don’t know who he is, or what he can be doing there, in the empty sepia dusk in Joseph Renouf’s field. I worry that he will see me; I worry he might be dangerous, but he seems quite unaware of me. He is utterly intent on something he has in his hand, which looks like an old cabbage stalk. As I watch he thrusts it against his face, gnawing furiously at it.
I wonder what can have happened, that a man has been reduced to this, to eating a thrown-out cabbage stalk. Has he escaped from a locked ward somewhere? Has he lost his mind?
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