The September Garden

by Catherine Law

  She reached Charterhouse Square and, sitting on a bench under a plane tree, she watched the lawyers and city men in pinstripes and bowlers, faces behind newspapers, come and go around the quiet medieval enclave, and contemplated how they simply carried on ashen-faced amid the chaos and ruin, just like she did. And yet, she supposed, those city workers got back on the Underground each evening and went home to their families, their lives, cherishing them for who knew what tomorrow might bring.

  Nell knew she could never go home again. Her lies, her forsaking of the truth, would follow her there and break the spell that she had cast around her. Impervious the spell was, and solid. It should stay here with her in London, where it protected her. Inside it, she floated in a senseless dreamworld where her parents were strangers, to each other and to her; and they did not know her any more.

  A man said good afternoon and sat down on her bench. She shifted her bottom along, mildly irritated, wishing she’d brought a book, always a good way to prevent conversation. There were plenty of other spare benches around the square, why didn’t he go elsewhere? She sensed him looking at her, askance, and she turned her face away, concentrating on a squirrel bouncing around the roots of a tree. Sunlight found its way through the branches, dappling the path. How clear blue the sky was, she thought, tilting her head. Such a lovely day.

  ‘My, my, you’re a difficult girl to track down.’

  Turning in surprise, Nell saw a familiar profile, a long Gallic nose.

  He doffed his hat, his grin wide.

  ‘Surely you remember me, Mademoiselle Nell,’ he said. ‘Henri. Sylvie’s friend. Well, I say l’ami, but we are so much more than that. I am forever asking her to marry me. She still refuses, you know. She runs off to Berkshire, and she comes back, and still she does not want me. She’s a stubborn one, that cousin of yours. Very stubborn indeed.’

  Nell glanced around her, embarrassed and on edge, wanting to take flight.

  ‘Track down?’ she said, with a shake. ‘Who is trying to track me down?’

  ‘There are many people looking for you,’ he said. ‘And I see you have disguised yourself rather successfully as a nurse.’

  ‘I am a nurse. In training.’

  ‘Where?’

  Nell opened her mouth to tell him, and then snapped it shut. She saw the mischievous glint in his eye.

  ‘Not even my mother knows where I work,’ she said. ‘So why should I tell you? I’ve only met you once before.’

  ‘Ah, I see. So you have. And so you have run away from home?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘Run away from something, then?’

  ‘Perhaps you are right.’ She stood up and gathered her handbag with a little huffy show. ‘Good day to you, sir.’

  ‘Not so hasty, mademoiselle. What would you say if I buy you a drink, and I tell you news of Mr Hammond?’

  Nell’s legs turned to straw. A great whoosh of pain blew out her middle. She sat back down, hard, on the bench.

  ‘I’m not surprised Sylvie refuses to marry you,’ she muttered, staring at Henri through eyes cloudy with tears. Her mouth was as dry as chalk. ‘Why would she want to marry you, when she is married to Mr Hammond? Because who would not want to be married to him? And she has a baby. She is so very lucky.’ A sob broke from her chest. ‘I’m sure they are very happy together – why should you break them up?’

  Henri’s calm voice slipped below the storm raging in her head. ‘She is not married to him or anyone. Do you think me an utter, pathetic fool to chase her if she was? Come and have a drink with me.’ He took her hand and held it as if that would stop it shaking. He linked her arm through his and pressed it tight to his side as she leant onto him. ‘Brandy is good for shock. I know a little place. A nice old tavern just round the corner in Smithfield.’

  She sat in the ill-lit pub, resplendent with stained glass and oil lamps, and pictures of hunts and shoots, sipping at the drink Henri gave her. It tasted like blistering fire. He sat by her, earnestly peering at her face while he told her that her cousin had never been pregnant, it had been a false alarm, and that she had not married Alex. But, he said, she had been engaged to him for nearly a year.

  ‘There, you see.’ Nell’s words stumbled and rose to a pitiful pitch. ‘She means a great deal to him, for them to be engaged for all that time.’

  ‘Mr Hammond did not come back from France for nearly a year. Put it this way: Sylvie stubbornly wore her ring for the whole time. We can deduce from that, that she was sweet on Mr Hammond. He was delayed in France. Something went wrong on the beach. He was left behind and became a guest of our Resistance; he escaped down the lines to Spain.’

  The bones in Nell’s hands stiffened, her fingertips went cold. She murmured something about chance and danger and terror, shaking her head to try to understand what Henri was telling her. To think that had been happening to Alex, and she’d had no idea.

  ‘He is safe?’ she asked at last, her bravery finding its way through the clot of fear in her throat.

  ‘He is now.’

  She sat back against the pub chair and tried the brandy again, breathing hard with relief. She remained silent for a while, trying to find a way through her thoughts, force it all to make sense: Alex and Sylvie did not get married; did not have a baby.

  She glanced at Henri and saw his compassion and patience.

  ‘He wrote to me before he went to France,’ she told him, ‘but I did not get the letter for a year. I went to live at my father’s house, you see, and my mother never forwarded it.’

  ‘What did he write?’

  ‘His regret, his deep love for me. His sorrow. But his duty to Sylvie. His duty to “the cause”. He said all of that. I read it every day.’ Her voice was barely a whisper. ‘But in the meantime, I sent him a telegram from my father’s house. Sent it BFPO. This was before … before I went into nursing. I don’t even know if he ever received it.’

  Henri waited. Eventually he asked her, what did the telegram say?

  ‘It was four words. Never contact me again.’

  She choked, then, as a helpless sob filled her throat.

  ‘Why did you hide yourself away?’ Henri asked her. ‘You’ve worried a lot of people. Your mother and father, Sylvie tells me.’

  Nell looked at him, and saw a gentleman in a pristine suit, the cut of which was divine. His haircut suggested the military, and yet she knew he was in intelligence; Sylvie had hinted that he was very well connected, very brainy. He knew far more secrets than anyone should do in this war.

  ‘You probably know already?’ she asked. ‘Why I had to hide.’

  ‘You were in love with Alex Hammond. And Sylvie got there first.’

  ‘She didn’t,’ Nell retorted. ‘I got there first.’

  Henri grinned, and then his face fell. His high cheekbones reddened. He looked mildly embarrassed at her confession.

  ‘How did you manage to evade everyone?’ he asked. ‘They knew you’d gone into nursing. We’ve established that. But you’ve managed it for nearly two years.’

  ‘I knew that my mother wouldn’t talk to my father. And my father wouldn’t talk to my mother.’ Nell considered how her father and Diana would assume John-James was being cared for at Lednor by Mrs B and her mother. And yet her mother did not know he’d ever been born. Her deception was cruel and it terrified her. One more reason never to go back. ‘I wrote at Christmas and at birthdays. I told them I was perfectly happy.’

  ‘But, I can see you are not.’

  Nell pressed her fingernails into her palm, desperate to stop the tears. She did not want to cry in front of this man.

  ‘More recently,’ Henri said, ‘Mr Hammond approached me. He knows my skills.’

  Nell glanced through the high pub window distracted by the pearly June sky – just like it was on the evening of the village fête. That delicate light, so precious. It filled her with delicious memories. Alex wants to find me. She held the idea in the palm of her hand and it felt like a
n exquisite charm.

  She suddenly glanced at her watch, realised the time. She had to sign back in at the nursing home at 9 o’clock sharp and the light summer evening was confusing her.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Henri, watching her, ‘I’ll get you back on time.’

  Nell swallowed another tot of brandy.

  ‘I’m not proud of what I did. I am a thief and a liar.’

  ‘Oh, ma chérie, we are all both of those things.’

  ‘I took my stepmother’s school certificate and her ration book. That’s all I needed. I had to buy my own uniform.’

  ‘Your stepmother’s?’

  ‘She’s only about five years older than me.’

  ‘What about your identification papers?’

  ‘I pretended they’d been lost. In the chaos, it seemed so easy. They were desperate for nurses. Somehow, it was never resolved and I was lost into bureaucracy. I often wonder when they’ll rumble me.’

  Henri congratulated her, raised his glass of beer to her.

  ‘You’re in the wrong job, my dear.’

  She sat for some moments in silence, longing to know the answer to the question that had plagued her, driven her senseless, made her reckless with grief.

  ‘Where is he?’ she finally said. ‘Where is Alex?’

  ‘Ah. I cannot tell you.’

  Infuriated, she asked, ‘But is he safe? Is he in London?’

  ‘He is not in London. But he is somewhere safe,’ said Henri. ‘Safe, at least for tonight.’

  Adele

  It seemed to her that deep midnight had only just passed, yet already the sky in the east on such a short summer night was awakening with soft luminosity. The full and radiant moon hung just out of her reach. Below the cottage she could hear the waves licking languidly at the sea wall. She’d never seen a spring tide so high or the water so deep and heavy. The air was still, the night was tender and tranquil, like a muffling blanket. Moonlight silvered the barbed wire twisting out of the sand.

  For weeks now, her nights had been disturbed by sporadic Allied raids further along the coast, on Caen and on Merville. The explosions and flares lit the horizon like ominous flashes of lightning; and the retorts from the Panzer units’ anti-aircraft guns brought rumblings and vibrations. But up here by the sea, at the apex of the peninsular, Montfleur had been left in relative peace. Even so, despite this, life every day was corrupted by fear.

  Standing by the bedroom window, Adele reached her hand down a fraction to touch her fingertip to her sleeping daughter’s cheek. She could see the little girl’s face, oval and pale in the half darkness. Sophie, now three years old, was tucked in Jean’s passed-down truckle bed, snoring in dreamless sleep. Two-month-old Pierre, in the crib next to her, had been an underweight baby, underfed by Adele’s own lack of food and aching hunger.

  Incredibly, too, Jean was fast asleep in the bed. The doctor had at last been able to give him a sleeping tablet; they had been hard to get hold of in recent months. Her husband had hardly slept since that night three months ago when the maquisard blew up a convoy on the road to Cherbourg; since the German machine gunner keeping watch on the roof of one of the trucks had strafed the hedge, shattering both of Jean’s ankles and destroying his feet. Two nights later, the doctor, under cover of darkness in his own salon, in danger of the arrest of himself and his family, had removed the splintered bones, fractured toes; he’d sliced through and stitched severed tendons.

  ‘You will be lucky if gangrene doesn’t set in. Watch out for blood poisoning,’ he warned Adele as Jean, reviving from the first dose of ether, began to spit through his teeth in screaming bloody agony.

  Adele now watched her husband sleep. They’d run out of morphine two weeks ago, and his wretched torment had returned with fresh onslaught and carved itself into his wide, handsome face. But, thanks to the sleeping pill, he lay in the mercy of sleep, his dark hair ruffled against the pillow. The covers at the end of the bed were raised by one of Madame Ricard’s small tables so the weight of the sheets and blankets would not press on her son’s destroyed extremities.

  The crutches, leaning in the corner, helped Jean get down the stairs and to the outside lavatory and back. That, in months, was as far as his strength would allow him to go. Simon took the Orageux Bleu out with the help of a lad from the village. The people of Montfleur had expected Simon, Jean and the rest of the cell to be flushed out and lined up against the mairie wall to be shot. But inexplicably, Jean had been left alone, and Simon to continue with the fishing. The elder and the younger Madame Ricard had sat in terror of the Gestapo’s knock on the door. It never came. Adele wondered if Monsieur Orlande had used his influence this time.

  In the past few months, as the weather eased itself into the warmth of summer, she had noticed that German soldiers began to outnumber the population of Montfleur. Units seemed to be on the move, colonising the surrounding fields with their camps, building makeshift kitchens and digging foxholes and commandeering people’s doors to cover them. There was an incessant rumble of trucks up and down the country roads and a more frequent hard marching of boots across the square. Perhaps, Jean had commented, this was in response to an intelligence that they had no hope of even guessing at. Their radio had been down for weeks, the cell disbanded.

  It was only tonight that her mother-in-law had managed to obtain a new battery for the radio, but when they tuned in just before bedtime they heard a babble of incoherent messages that were impossible to decipher. They switched off.

  Adele glanced down. Pierre was stirring and uttering plaintive mews, his little gumless mouth nuzzling the back of her hand. Fearful of both Sophie and Jean waking, Adele plucked him from the crib and headed downstairs to the parlour to feed him. She sat by the banked-down fire. Even in June, the stone house did not feel warm and she shivered under her shawl as her baby suckled.

  Pierre was a slow, lazy feeder; he had no energy to try. Adele, realising she would be sitting there for a long time, felt in the pocket of her dressing gown for Madame Orlande’s letter which had arrived a week ago. She reread it, feeling a sting of pathos as she perused her old employer’s hand. Such a marvellous letter writer she had once been. And now reduced to a few lines on a fragment of pilfered paper.

  Her eyes fell heavy as Beth Orlande’s words drifted through her mind. Pray for my dear Sylvie … my dear sister and her family … how are the cabbages and the beans, Adele? … how are the neighbours? Our camp is truly intolerable … we have one stove between ten of us and ten books between about sixty of us. I have been rereading Rebecca, darling Sylvie’s favourite book … All fine old fillies here … we’ve become quite a rabble … English, Dutch … an American woman who was something at the consulate in Paris. Wrong place, wrong time, she keeps saying. She’s been saying that for months. She bores me. We sew uniforms and make socks for German soldiers. They will have the warmest feet in the war. I have taken up table tennis … Quite unladylike. What would Sylvie say? I hope for a visit from Monsieur if things quieten down. Can’t believe it has been three years. Three years in this hole … Pray for Monsieur … He takes it all very hard.

  ‘She knows nothing of you, little one, or of Sophie,’ Adele whispered to Pierre’s oblivious little face. ‘She knows nothing at all.’

  She folded the letter away and dozed. The small square window, cut into the deep stone wall, grew lighter. The night, she sensed sleepily, altered and the silence was suddenly being consumed by a deep rumbling. It came closer and closer by the second like processional thunder. Adele, suddenly alert, knew that it was aircraft. She was used to the sound, but this grew so immense and so embracing that the air was bracketed by metallic vibration, stuffing her brain and blocking her ears. And then she jumped up; the engines were droning in over La Manche. Allied bombers, covering the sky, coming their way. She clutched Pierre to her chest.

  And then cannon fire, like she had never heard before, from way out at sea. The thunderous roar tore up the air. Windows rattled, the shutters
vibrated. The explosions thumped in fury onto the land to the south of Montfleur over and over again.

  She turned in shock. Madame Ricard appeared at the parlour door in her white nightgown.

  ‘Oh, Maman!’ cried Adele. ‘What is it? What on earth is it? This is worse than ever.’

  ‘It’s over at the Bay of the Seine. I’ll try the radio,’ said the older woman. ‘See if I can’t find some news.’

  Madame Ricard bent to her radio set but the airwaves were strangled and merely spluttered an awful whining, then silence. ‘I can’t find any frequency,’ she sighed. ‘All hell has been let loose,’ she muttered, glancing up at the ceiling, out of the window. ‘This is appalling.’

  ‘Hold the baby,’ said Adele. ‘I need to get Jean and Sophie downstairs. We should go to the cellar.’

  In the upstairs bedroom, above the protection of the sea wall, the weight of the bombardment was phenomenal. Adele stood in the doorway, petrified. With each insane salvo, she felt as if a train was passing over her, emptying her body, demolishing her senses. Sophie was crying, clutching at her father, as Jean struggled to reach his crutches.

  ‘You know what I think this is,’ he said, eyes bright in the half-light, his fingers clutching at Adele’s arm. The air raid siren began to howl, ineffective and drowned instantly by the thunderous noise. ‘Those are naval guns. British naval guns. Adele, my love. We’ve fought for so long. This is what we’ve been fighting for. Waiting for. This is it.’

  During a moment of quiet in the cannons’ terrible voice, Adele heard thumping on the front door. She went up the dark cellar stairs and was met with a morning of light and lucidity; an exceptional summer’s day. As she opened the door the bouquet from Madame Ricard’s rose bushes by the step was immediately swamped by the acid scent of gun smoke on the breeze.