Adele’s teary eyes focused past her shoulder with a confused blend of surprise and recognition.
‘This is all rather puzzling.’ It was Alex’s voice, behind her. ‘Madame Ricard? From Montfleur? Can it be?’
‘I’m sure, yes. It could be. But I think I really must find Mademoiselle at once. She must need me. Please excuse me.’ Adele stood up quickly and walked towards the church door.
In a daze, Nell took a step back as if to get a better view of the man standing in front of her. Alex wore an immaculate suit. His face bore deeper lines than she remembered. But his smile was as familiar and as devastating as ever.
‘You’re here?’ Nell croaked. ‘You’re here?’
He stepped towards her. ‘When you telephoned, to hear your voice was unbelievable. After all this time. I thought I’d never hear it again, let alone see you. The telephone call was rather bizarre, so then, of course, I had to come up to Lednor. Is this for Sylvie’s mother? Oh, I am so very sorry.’
Unable to speak, Nell glanced instead over her shoulder to see Sylvie leave the church and walk towards them down the path. She turned on Alex. Anger – illogical and frenzied – snapped inside her head.
‘Are you sure you’re not here to see Sylvie?’
‘Oh God, no. Oh Nell, no.’
Sylvie stopped in her tracks, still some way off, with Henri and Adele either side of her. Adele began to speak to her in hushed tones as Henri leant in, talking quietly. Sylvie shook her head at them both and then beamed at Nell, her face oddly serene, the beauty of it coming like a light from within. She nodded and lifted her hand to salute Nell, her eyes glistening, then turned and walked away towards her mother’s grave.
‘I was a fool with Sylvie.’ Alex was breathless, speaking quickly. ‘Wrong place, wrong time. I was, frankly, beside myself.’
She felt his hand touch hers, delicately by the tips of her fingers. She saw the pain on his face and knew, then, that she was going to make it worse.
He tried again. ‘You told me to leave you alone – to quite frankly get lost. And so I did, I suspect. I did get lost. The years, the war, just created that dreadful breach. But I can’t tell you, your telephone call made my head split with delight, with hope, I …’
‘Can we walk, away from here? I want to get away.’
He assented and they hurried together in silence out of the churchyard, along the lane, and left the village behind. The light of the November day was failing, and the damp air over the Chess spread its thin chilly breath to reach them on the lane. An owl called prematurely from the depths of the copse.
‘I remember this way,’ said Alex, endeavouring to be conversational. ‘When we walked back after my petrol ran out. What a night. I am so sorry that it has been like this. I have never forgotten.’
‘And neither have I,’ she said. With a jolt she understood that whatever had happened between them, however long the years had taken to turn and turn, none of it had any bearing on how she felt about him.
Alex cleared his throat. ‘It must have been a horrible shock when you heard Sylvie’s news,’ he said cautiously. ‘And by the time it was all resolved, the misunderstanding between Sylvie and I, well, you’d gone. I wrote to you and you waited a year to send a telegram—’
‘Alex, please stop,’ she held up her hand. ‘You don’t have to explain. I know what happened. But you don’t know my side of it. What happened to me.’
‘I understand you threw yourself into nursing.’
‘I failed you, Alex.’
‘No, no, no.’
‘I lied to everyone. I lied to you.’
She pulled on his arm to make him stop walking. In the deep silence of the dusk, the cold river babbled in the shallows, and she breathed on the chill, her eyes adjusting to the gloom under the trees. She felt the air refresh her, restart her heart. Something changed inside her; shifted out of the way. She suddenly was profoundly grateful that Alex was standing before her. That they had both survived the war. It seemed like an absolute bloody miracle. She gazed up at him and held both of his hands. His face was expectant and rather placid. She could barely look at him and watch his expression fall away as she told him that she had borne his child, and that his child had died, and that his name was John-James.
Alex placed his hand over his eyes, resting his other on her shoulder. His chest shuddered as he suppressed a cry. She waited, her veins pumping ice.
After some moments he found his voice, and it cracked in his throat.
‘You must have been in hell.’
‘I was on the edge of it. I was blind crazy.’
‘Why didn’t you …? You must have needed me. Why didn’t you tell me?’
She could not answer him.
Instead, she took his hand and they continued on up the lane, negotiating the ford by walking carefully from one stepping stone to another, helping one another, using touch and instinct to cross safely. The memory of them splashing riotously through the water the night of the air raid, the night John-James was conceived, nudged her. How the closeness of death and terror had made them heedless, had made them laugh.
‘Your own hell would have been in France,’ she said. ‘I hear that you went twice?’
‘That woman. The French woman, back at the church, I …’
It was no use, the phantom of John-James rejoined them.
A numb silence fell around them. His arm went round her and she rested her head on his shoulder. It felt like a profound anchorage, as if she was home.
The house was in darkness at the end of the drive, except for the lamp in the hallway window.
‘Who’s this?’ asked Alex. ‘Oh, I know who this is.’
Kit, having taken to sleeping on the front step when no one was at home, lifted his long-snouted head and whimpered in recognition.
‘Oh, what a good lad.’ Alex knelt down to receive the sniffs and nudges and grunts of delight from the dog.
‘Come, Kit,’ said Nell.
As she pushed open the wooden door to the September Garden, the slow moon brightened suddenly inside a corridor of milky stars. The shapes within the garden slowly became apparent: the gnarled apple tree, drifts of spent dahlia, lanky sunflowers buckled and broken, silhouetted in the gloom.
Alex exclaimed and stumbled. ‘It’s too dark,’ he said with an edge of panic, disguising the fall of his tears. ‘How will I ever see?’
Nell gripped his arm and walked with him. She felt embalmed in comfort, floating alongside him. And his arm about her told her all she needed to know.
‘It’s all right, Alex,’ she told him. ‘Kit knows the way in the darkness. Let’s follow him.’
Acknowledgements
The September Garden has been four years in the making and proves what they say: that the second novel is often the hardest. There have certainly been a few setbacks, including two titles and two rewrites, and I’m so grateful to my agent Judith Murdoch for always believing in me and encouraging me along what has been a very long journey.
The first spark for the story came from The Normandy Diary of Marie-Louise Osmont (Random House), which I picked up in a second-hand bookshop. This feisty and independent Normandy château owner gives her firsthand account of living in occupied France and through the hopeful and desperate days of the Allied invasion. Haunted and inspired by her shocking experiences, I went from there, linking the story back to England with the idea of two cousins who were caught up in the dark, uncertain days of the conflict.
A huge amount of research has gone into creating a convincing background for my characters, including days spent at the Imperial War Museum, London, and the Liberation Museum, Cherbourg, plus devouring many articles and books. I’d like to thank Neil Wood for lending me his 78-volume Images of War, The Real Story of World War Two (Marshall Cavendish), which gave me valuable insight into what people would have known at the time (through newspaper headlines and reports) often in contrast to how much more we know now.
To write truthfully
about a place, I have to see it with my own eyes, and I’d like to thank my mother Coral for coming with me on my recce trip to Normandy and navigating so patiently while I drove our hire car so erratically through the French countryside. We arrived, coincidently, on the 65th anniversary of D-Day and everywhere we went, through towns and villages, we saw Allied flags and Welcome to our Liberators banners. We stayed in Valognes in the Grand Hotel du Louvre, a turreted building of silvery stone on a narrow cobbled street. It was there that I discovered, in the quiet courtyard behind, the stables of the long-departed horses Tatillon and Ullis.
Other books that have inspired many aspects of my novel include: Forgotten Voices of the Second World War by Max Arther, Debs at War by Anne de Courcy and Wild Mary: The Life of Mary Wesley by Patrick Marnham. Plus the writings of war-time correspondent Edward Murrow, This is London, and the books of two great novelists who experienced the war: Nevil Shute’s Pastoral and H.E. Bates’ A Moment in Time.
About the Author
CATHERINE LAW was born in Harrow, Middlesex in 1965 and has been a journalist for twenty-two years, having trained first as a secretary at the BBC and then attending the London College of Printing. She now works on a glossy interiors magazine and lives in Buckinghamshire.
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
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First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2012.
This ebook edition first published by Allison & Busby in 2012.
Copyright © 2012 by CATHERINE LAW
The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1230–4
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