The hot coffee did her good. Beatrice wrapped her numb hands around the cup and felt a tingling warmth.
How nice it is, she thought, to sit here and drink coffee with Julien and not have to be over there listening to Erich’s prattle and Helene’s whining.
“What do you do all day?” She asked.
Julien looked quite proud. “I study English. I know it from school, but I didn’t have any practice. Now I’m reading books in English. And Dr. Wyatt gave me a grammar book that I’m working with. Don’t you think I’m already pretty good?”
“You’re perfect.” In fact his English had gotten a lot better. He did speak with a strong French accent, same as before, but Beatrice only found this more interesting. She could have listened to him for hours.
“I really don’t know,” Julien continued, “if I can ever go back to my home. As I see it there won’t be an unoccupied France much longer either. The Germans spread like a cancer, they keep growing, quickly and blindly. So if I should get to leave this island, maybe I can only go over to England. It’s better then if I can have a command of the language.”
His dark, melancholy eyes misted over, and over his face came an expression of sadness and weariness that moved Beatrice. She was tempted to reach for his hand, but then shyly held back.
“You’re homesick, aren’t you?” she asked instead.
Julien nodded. “Sometimes I think I’ll die of homesickness. For my parents, my brothers and sisters, my country. For my friends, for my language. And for freedom.” He took a deep breath. “Cold and damp hang in your clothes and in your hair, Beatrice. What I’d like most is to drink these all in. Often I feel such a strong need to run off, to climb on the cliffs by the sea, run through the fields, roam the forests. To lay my head down on the earth and breath in the smell of grass and trees and flowers or to feel the cold wind on my face. I think I’ll go crazy if I can’t finally test my strength again, if I can’t feel my muscles and my body …” He moved his arm. “I exercise every day with weights. I can’t just sit by and watch while my body gets weaker and weaker.”
“Maybe it won’t last for that much longer,” Beatrice tried to console him. “They say things aren’t going well for the Germans in Russia.”
Julien raised his hands. “Who knows? Hitler has the devil on his side. The devil is strong.” Suddenly he changed the subject. “How is Pierre? Is he still there with you?”
“Yes. When you escaped they interrogated him. And tortured him.”
“I feared they would. I shouldn’t have run away, right? But I’d been nursing the thought for so long. Over and over again I made plans, and I tried to convince Pierre, too. I wanted to flee with him. But Pierre was too afraid. He kept saying he wouldn’t dare do such a thing. After awhile it was clear to me that I could only do it alone. That he wouldn’t have the nerves for it.”
“He’s doing relatively well now,” said Beatrice. “There’s not really that much to do in winter. He’s given very little to eat. But, generally, he’s treated well.”
Julien nodded absentmindedly. Then his eyes swept over the kitchen, anxious and alert. “We have to be very careful,” he said urgently. “Are you sure that no one followed you?”
“No, no one. And I won’t tell anyone anything either. I just hope …” She didn’t finish the sentence, knowing that Julien sensed what she was thinking. Raids and home inspections were part of the daily routine on the island, and Dr. Wyatt could be a target as much as anyone else. Julien was in the most extreme danger, day and night.
“We’ll get through all of this,” she said, with a movement of her hands that took in the tiny kitchen and meant the whole island. “All of it. This whole war, the Germans, the whole damn mess.”
Julien smiled. A radiance brightened his gloomy features and made him look as young as he was.
“The whole damn mess,” he repeated. “You’ve convinced me. We’ll get through this.”
The Germans’ luck took a serious turn in the spring of 1942, and despite all the efforts of the occupation force to suppress the news and instead let their own propaganda work its effects, the island’s population learned exactly what was happening on the front lines all over the world. There was almost no household that wouldn’t have been listening to the BBC in secret. Rumors spread from house to house, town to town. It was said that things weren’t looking good at all in Russia, and that the German population was suffering at night under English bombardment. Some had been saying that America would never enter the war, but had been silenced after the attack at Pearl Harbor. Churchill was planning an invasion of the mainland, some claimed, and still others said this was absurd, as Churchill could never mobilize enough troops. Emotions were running high, but even though no one could say anything definite, the war seemed to have entered a new phase. In a manner no one could yet define, the victory-bathed aura of the Germans had changed. They lost their luster. The Nazis had thought nothing and no one would be able to stop them, and now that seemed in no way certain. The Germans had shown that they weren’t invulnerable.
“Luck was on their side for a long time,” said Dr. Wyatt. “But no one can be lucky forever. Things go up and things go down. For the Nazis the same as for the rest of us.”
Beatrice was over at her friend’s house more frequently. As he had been before, Erich was often on the French mainland, and though Helene tried to keep her at home, she didn’t dare forbid her. Beatrice noticed that Mae was jealous on account of Julien. Until then she had been the only non-grown-up to know about the hideout, and now Beatrice had also been let in on it. And besides that, Beatrice was spending more time up in the attic than she was chatting, giggling and going on walks with Mae. She would converse with him for hours. She quizzed him on English vocabulary and let him teach her French. He read Victor Hugo to her, and told her how for a long time the French poet had lived on Guernsey.
“Keep reading,” she begged. She found The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the story of Quasimodo the bell-ringer, so thrilling that she didn’t want to interrupt the reading for a single moment.
“I don’t think you even recognize me anymore,” Mae complained. She was upset when Beatrice came to visit one day, said a quick hello and then headed straight for the attic. “You take no notice of me at all!”
“I promised Julien that I …” Beatrice began, but Mae started screaming. “Julien, Julien, Julien! You don’t think about anything else! You know what I think? You’re in love with Julien, that’s what it is. You’re completely gaga, and that’s why you’re always running up to see him.”
“Well, well, you haven’t said something that stupid in a long time,” Beatrice replied angrily, but for the rest of that day she heard Mae’s words in her head. She’s right, she thought, and the realization almost shook her. Of course she was in love with him, that was the strange feeling she’d been filled with all this time. Ever since Julien had looked at her so strangely on the day of his escape, something had been different inside her, but she hadn’t rightly known what it was. Now that she could identify it, her excitement rose until it was almost more than she could bear. She went home, locked herself in her room and looked at herself in the mirror over the dresser. She tried to see herself through Julien’s eyes. She saw a tall thin girl with gangly arms and legs, with a narrow face that looked immature to her, and a bit too pointed. Her eyes were somewhat crooked — “cat’s eyes,” Helene always said — and their gaze was serious and mildly skeptical. She looked older than Mae, she thought, definitely older than a thirteen-year-old girl. She didn’t like her wavy, dark brown hair — it was too thick, too unruly, too wild and windswept, instead of fine and silken.
She sighed, turned a little to see her profile, brushed her hair back, and attempted a coquettish smile that misfired completely. She wasn’t the coquettish type. She suspected she never would be.
She paused for a moment, then
she slowly slipped her dress off her shoulders. It was one of Helene’s summer dresses; Helene had altered it for her. Beatrice knew it suited her, and so she liked to wear it when she visited Julien. The light green made her eyes gleam and brought out a chestnut-colored shimmer in her hair. In any case, Julien claimed it did. She couldn’t perceive anything of the sort herself, but it was enough if Julien saw it.
The dress slipped down to her hips, then slid down her legs to the floor. Hesitantly she pulled her linen slip over her head. Shyly at first, and then critically, she looked at the bony upper half of her body: at her ribs, which showed visibly under the pale skin, and at her small, white breasts, with needle-thin, pale blue veins running through them and nipples that were bright red and firm. She didn’t take off her underwear — that would have been embarrassing to her on account of the mirror and of her thoughts of Julien. But she could see her hip bones, which jutted out sharply, and her thighs, which were very long and very smooth.
I have to get a bit curvier, she thought. Men like that, right? She remembered that Deborah had sometimes complained about having gained weight, and that in response Andrew had always said that for heaven’s sake she should guard every ounce, and if possible put on a few more.
“I’ve got to have something I can grab hold of,” he said. “Am I supposed to just stand there empty-handed?”
“The child!” Deborah hushed him, embarrassed, but “the child” had not only understood the words; she’d also noticed the looks Andrew had given Deborah, caressing her body. Like Julien, Beatrice thought now, when he looks at me.
The thought caused a curious sensation in her stomach. A kind of shiver — a mild, pleasant tugging sensation.
Maybe Julien was in love with her too.
The thought made her anxious, but happy as well. It meant that something in her life would change, or even that something had already changed. But perhaps it was a completely foolish thought she was getting swept up with. Could it really be that a twenty-year-old man would fall in love with a thirteen-year-old girl?”
Almost fourteen, she corrected herself. In September.
A few days later she happened by chance to speak to Julien about her birthday, and he asked her what she’d like from him. They were sitting in the attic, had just finished the reading of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. It was very warm outside; they had opened the skylight, but even still the air was sultry and full of dust. Julien had been restless the whole time, had interrupted his reading over and over, had paced back and forth. It would soon be a year from the day he’d fled and gone into hiding, and thinking of it seemed to fill him with terror.
“A year! A whole year!” He spoke with a stronger accent than usual. “I’ve been sitting in this box for a year already, locked up like a beast in a cage, and nothing has changed! The Germans are still here, my homeland is occupied, these islands too. It can go on for years like this, decades! I’ll spend my whole life in this garret! At some point I won’t even wish that things were different anymore, because I won’t be able to exist outside anymore. You forget how, you know. And maybe the Germans pull back when I’m an old man, and I go outside and find a world there before me that no longer bears any resemblance to the one I’ve known.”
“Everyone says that the Germans won’t be winning much longer.”
“No one knows that. It can go one way or the other. And my time keeps slipping away. I sit here, and no one helps me. No one!”
Eventually he had sat back down and continued reading, but he’d been distracted and had spoken so quickly that at times it was an effort for Beatrice to understand him. Finally he slammed the book shut, looked at her and asked when her birthday was and what she wanted from him.
“I don’t know. It’s still such a long time till then.”
“Regardless. I’d like to know what you’d like.”
She thought about it. “I’d like to have the book,” she said. “The story of the bell-ringer of Notre Dame.”
Immediately Julien handed it to her over the table.
“Here. Keep it. Of course you should have it — your first novel in the French language. But this old, tattered book isn’t a real birthday gift.”
Beatrice asked herself what else he would want to give her. He didn’t have a thing; not even the clothes he was wearing belonged to him, but rather to Dr. Wyatt.
“It’s a wonderful present,” she said.
“No, no,” Julien objected. He got up again and resumed pacing up and down. His face was tense. Then suddenly he stopped.
“I have an idea,” he announced. “I can’t give you anything proper, but we could do something special on your birthday. We’ll spend the night before your birthday by the ocean. We’ll wander over the cliffs, we’ll sit in the sand and let the moonlight shine down upon us, and maybe we’ll go swimming in the ocean and …”
Beatrice laughed. “That won’t ever work. It would be far too dangerous.”
“Of course it will work. We’ll be careful, and no one will see us.”
“But no one’s allowed out past curfew. German boats patrol up and down the coastline. We’ll be visible for sure. In September the nights aren’t quite as bright as they are now, but …”
“But?”
“We shouldn’t do it,” she said, without any kind of conviction.
Two steps and he was next to her. He pulled her up from the chair and took her in his arms. Never before had he been so close to her.
“We should do it,” he said softly. “There’s no sense in always being frozen with fear. Just this once, let’s do something crazy, wild, dangerous!”
She was still shaking her head, but her powers of resistance had long since toppled. Even if the fear made her go crazy — it would be better than to spend the night at home, standing before the window, looking at the velvety black sky, listening to the sounds in the grass and in the trees and thinking of what could have been, if she had only had a little more courage.
3
“He became my lover on the night of my fourteenth birthday,” said Beatrice, “and this he remained for a number of years. I was convinced that I could never again love someone as I loved him. At that age, love is frighteningly intense. It pulls the rug out from under you. Julien was all I could think of, morning, noon, and night. The thought came to me sometimes that I should be worrying more about my parents, and then I got a rather bad conscience. But it didn’t help. I was in love with Julien, and I was radiantly happy. In spite of the war and all its horrors. I felt overwhelmed with happiness.
“And no one saw you that night?” Franca asked.
Beatrice shook her head. “The night was clear and very bright. We ran over the cliffs, and there was no doubt we would have been visible from far away. But somehow we had luck on our side. Nothing happened. The Germans left us in peace, right up to the gray of dawn.”
“A romantic story,” said Franca, and Beatrice responded, “Sometimes I think it’s the hard times that bring out the romantic stories. You have to risk more for the payoff you receive.”
They were still sitting in the kitchen. It was well past midnight, and outside it had begun to rain. The April rain rushed down to earth, steady, hard, and strong. Earlier that evening the pizza deliverer had come by with the pizza. Now the empty cardboard boxes sat on the table, and the smell of melted cheese, tomato, and oregano lingered in the room. Beatrice had lit candles; the last bit of red wine in their glasses shimmered in their glow. The atmosphere was filled with trust and affection and a great deal of intimacy, none of which had been apparent between Franca and Beatrice until now. In the last few hours there had arisen a warmth of that special, uninhibited nature that only women can feel with one another. It didn’t matter that they each belonged to different generations. They understood one another.
“These days I sometimes ask myself if Julien really loved m
e,” Beatrice went on. “I mean, with the same devotion and self-abandon with which I loved him. I think for him I represented a connection to life. He felt buried, cut off, often hopeless. When he held me in his arms, he was simply a young man making love to a young woman. He was alive then. Maybe anyone else would have meant the same to him as I did.”
“Not Mae, though,” Franca offered. “The two of them had had half a year to let something develop between them. But nothing happened.”
“No, not with Mae. But she was also very much still a child — in comparison to me. Plus she was the daughter of the people who were hiding Julien, who were risking who knows how much for him. Sleeping with her, as young as she was, would have meant unbelievable pangs of conscience for Julien. He wouldn’t have done it.”
“You were also very young.”
“I turned fourteen on our first night together. Aren’t girls today even younger? It was certainly uncommon then, but …” Beatrice shrugged her shoulders. “But the circumstances permitted nothing else. That’s how it seemed to us, in any case.”
“Weren’t you afraid of getting pregnant?”
“Of course. Constantly. We tried to be careful, as well as we could. In the end we were really just lucky. All those years, nothing happened.”
“And the Wyatts didn’t catch on in the slightest?”
“They were already used to me being up there with him for hours. Dr. Wyatt was seldom home anyway. The door to the attic was closed, the ladder was pulled up. For safety reasons this was always the case, there could have been a raid at any moment. So if Mae or her mother wanted anything from us, they had to let us know they were there, and we opened up and lowered the ladder. There weren’t any surprise visits.”
The Rose Gardener Page 24