by Janet Tanner
And then the prisoner began to cough.
She froze, numb with horror, at the first muffled explosion and the helpless paroxysm which followed. The German’s eyes, cold and blue, turned towards the trap door. ‘What is there?’ he barked.
Lola was chalky white, her eyes dark with fear.
‘Is nothing. Is my son’s bedroom.’
‘And your son – he has very bad cough, yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t think so! Show me your son, huh?’
Charles and Lola exchanged glances. They were trapped and they knew it. But neither was willing to allow the enemy to see them grovel.
‘Bastard! See for yourself! I show you nothing!’ Lola cried defiantly, whilst Charles shouted: ‘It’s nothing to do with her. Nothing to do with any of them but me. I am responsible! Me – do you hear?’
The German crossed to the window, threw it open and called to his colleagues. Although he spoke in German his meaning was clear enough, ‘in here! I think I have found him!’ Then he drew his revolver and turned to Charles. ‘Open that door now – or I will shoot.’
‘Open it yourself!’
Charles was facing the German defiantly and Sophia instinctively reached for Catherine, trying to protect her with her arms. Then she screamed with shock as the attic door was opened from the inside and the Russian, with a strength born of desperation, launched himself out. He landed full on the German, knocking him to the ground. The revolver cracked, the bullet embedding itself harmlessly in the ceiling, and as the two men rolled over and over together the two girls clung to each other in terror. Then three pairs of boots were thundering up the stairs and the German soldier’s colleagues burst into the room. In a matter of moments it was all over. The Russian was overpowered and dragged to his feet; whilst two of the Germans held him with his arms behind his back the first one pounded his fist into the – Russian’s face again and again until his head rolled drunkenly on his neck, blood pouring from his nose and mouth.
‘Take him!’ the German ordered, then turned to Charles and Lola. ‘And you two – get your coats. You are under arrest!’
For a moment Lola glared haughtily at him, her violet eyes cold with hatred. Then she tossed one glossy braid of hair back over her shoulder, lifted her chin and spat scornfully into the German’s face. Instantly his hand shot out, slapping her so hard Sophia heard the click of bone and Lola almost fell. Then he drew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped away the globule of spit.
‘Bitch!’ he said in English. ‘You will pay for that. And since your temper is so hot I think you do not need your coat. Come!’
He pushed Lola out of the room and down the stairs. Sophia and Catherine huddled at the window watching as Charles and Lola were dragged down the path to the waiting transport. Catherine had begun to sob softly, her breath coming in small staccato hiccoughs, and as Charles and Lola were bundled into the transport her body went rigid for a moment, then she began to scream.
‘Mama! Mama! Oh no – no!’
Sophia stood, wild-eyed, poised like a bird ready for flight. A pulse was hammering in her throat, adrenalin coursing through her veins so that her whole body throbbed with it. She had to do something – she couldn’t just stand here and watch them take her parents!
The door of the transport slammed, the engine roared.
‘Mama!’ Catherine screamed again and Sophia’s arms tightened around her, turning the small stricken tear-wet face into her chest.
‘It’s all right,’ she heard herself say. ‘It will be all right.’
But already she knew in her heart it would not be all right. And screamed inwardly as Catherine had screamed at the injustice of it and the terrible impotence she felt knowing there was nothing, nothing she could do to save her beloved parents from the fate that awaited them.
As Sophia had feared Charles and Lola were brought before the court, tried and sentenced to deportation. In spite of all their efforts none of the Carteret children were allowed to see them.
The days passed, muddled and unreal. It was, Sophia thought, a little like living in a limbo world, for their emotions were still muffled by shock and an inability to appreciate yet that this terrible thing had really happened. Each morning Sophia woke half-expecting to hear Lola’s strident voice filling the little cottage or Charles’ tuneless whistle drifting up the stairs to tell her it had all been a terrible dream. Then, as the silence stretched on, cold and empty, the realisation would come to her that it had not been a dream, and with it the sick ache deep inside her would grow and spread, creeping up her throat to form a choking lump. Quickly, before she could be engulfed by it, she would push aside the covers and go downstairs to make breakfast, forcing herself to pass her parents’ room without so much as a glance inside, though she could picture all too well its unnatural tidyness – the bed, which she had made after they had been dragged from it so unceremoniously on the morning of their arrest, unslept in, Lola’s cosmetic jars neatly stacked along the dressing table with every lid in place, Charles’s pipe lying in the ashtray and his old jacket with the patched sleeves hanging behind the door.
It would stay like that until their return, she promised herself, the furniture dusted and polished, everything in its place. And if sometimes the fear crept up on her that they would never return she pushed it quickly aside. She must believe they would come back one day when the war was over – she must. It was the only way to hang on to her sanity. She couldn’t allow herself to go to pieces – she had to be strong for the others.
Both Catherine and Paul had taken what had happened very badly. Those first days Catherine could do nothing but cry – Sophia had even heard her sobbing in her sleep – and she could hardly bear to let Sophia out of her sight. Sophia could understand the terrible insecurity and grief that drove her; in many ways Catherine was still very much a child, having always been fussed over and loved as the youngest of the family, but Catherine’s constant presence and her tears imposed an even greater strain on her own self-control. As for Paul, Sophia soon found she could not expect the moral support from him which she might have hoped for. He went out a good deal, disappearing for hours on end and often not returning until long after curfew so that Sophia was terrified he too would be caught and questioned by the occupying forces and many a night she stood at the window, peeping between the curtains into the pitch black night, her nerves in tatters as she prayed anxiously for his return. But when he was in the house he might as well not have been there, for he mooched around like a silent ghost, saying nothing if she did not speak to him and snapping her nose off when she did.
He had cried too. Sophia had come down one night and found him sitting at the kitchen table, his head bent on to his folded arms, sobbing bitterly. The sight had deepened her own desolation and filled her with unreasoning resentment. Unfair, she knew – Paul had every right to his emotions – but she felt betrayed by his breakdown. He was her big brother; couldn’t she expect to lean on him just a little? She had stood in the doorway for a little while, watching him and not knowing what to do, and when he looked up and saw her she was shocked by his ravaged, tear-stained face.
‘Oh Sophia – I’m sorry …’ He covered his eyes with his hands again and she saw the tension knotting his knuckles. ‘I’m so sorry …’
‘Come on, Paul, pull yourself together,’ she said, aware she sounded like an echo of Lola. ‘ It’s awful, I know, but we’ve just got to carry on. Going to pieces won’t help anyone.’
‘But I should have been here!’ Paul’s voice was muffled by his hands. Saliva mingled with tears and ran down his chin.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘When it happened – I should have been here!’
Sophia sighed. ‘That’s nonsense and you know it. You being here wouldn’t have made the slightest bit of difference. In fact it might have made things worse. They might have arrested you as well.’
Paul did not answer. She was right, he supposed, but it did
not make him feel any better. For a moment the terrible, almost unreasoning guilt he was experiencing weighed on him so heavily that he almost told her exactly why it was he felt so terrible about what had happened. But he could not bring himself to. He did not want to see his blame for himself reflected in her eyes.
No, it wouldn’t have made any difference, he told himself. That much was true. But he couldn’t forget that almost the last words he had spoken to his parents had been lies. Whilst they were being arrested he had been practising a deception on them and also cheating on his brother. For that terrible night when the Russian had come to them for sanctuary Paul had not been spending the night with a friend as he had pretended. He had been spending it with Vivienne Moran.
He had met her one day quite by chance in town and she had come running up to him to ask if he had any news of Nicky. She must have known, of course, that he wouldn’t have – contact with anyone outside the island was impossible. But she had asked all the same, because just talking to Paul gave her a vicarious contact with the man she adored and had not seen for what seemed like a lifetime.
Viv had recovered now from the injuries she had received in the bombing. The terrible recurrent headaches which had plagued her in the beginning came less often now and were not so severe and her strong young body had mended well. But although it was now four long years since Nicky’s departure and her abortion there was still a yawning emptiness in Viv. In the early days she had nursed it with a fervour that was almost a religion, the pain somehow kept Nicky alive in her heart. Later, as the images began to blur so that Nicky seemed almost like a sad sweet dream, she had returned to her old ways, reaching out greedily for ‘life’ with the friends who had once seemed so attractive. But the pursuit of pleasure no longer held her in the same thrall, her gaiety was brittle and forced. Viv had glimpsed something much deeper, much stronger, and she yearned for Nicky and what they had shared with all her heart.
At first, when she caught sight of Paul she had thought for a heart-stopping moment that it was Nicky. It was not the first time she had thought she had seen him and followed a stranger down the street only to discover, when he turned around that there was no similarity at all. But mostly that had occurred in the early days, when she was still obsessed. Now, the shock was different, just as stomach-lurching, but more understandable, for since she had seen him last Paul had grown up, and at the same time grown disconcertingly like his brother.
Close to, of course, the likeness was less striking. Paul’s face was rounder than Nicky’s, without the angles and planes that made Nicky so devastatingly attractive, his hair was straighter, falling over his forehead from the parting high on the side of his head, and his eyes were light hazel rather than Nicky’s startling violet. But like Nicky he was tall and well-built and the family likeness was apparent enough to make her heart begin to beat faster.
That first day Viv had nothing in mind beyond talking about Nicky. But afterwards she found herself unable to forget Paul. That night she dreamed about him, a muddled, yearning dream and when she woke the aura of it remained with her as if in some strange way the brothers had merged and become one.
Viv made some enquiries and discovered that Paul had left school and was working as a counter clerk at the bank. One night she waylaid him as he was leaving, managing to make it look like a chance meeting. She was fully prepared this time to find herself disappointed by him. She was no fool and she realised in her aching loneliness she was using his substance as a substitute for Nicky. But when she saw him it was just the same. Paul might be three years younger than her, he might not be Nicky, but the wonderful echo of Nicky was there all the same, plucking at the deepest chords of her memories and emotions, bringing a faint elusive taste of that sweet sharp excitement.
They began to meet regularly and before long Viv was obsessed with the need to recreate what she and Nicky had shared. It was no longer enough to be with someone who looked like Nicky, who was Nicky’s flesh and blood, she had to go further. The need had become physical, it was a creeping ache which invaded her bones and when she was with Paul she felt as if her flesh was rising up to meet his, every muscle, every nerve, every pore crying out to be touched, to be loved. Sometimes, when their eyes met, she felt her heart flutter so hard she could scarcely breathe.
One evening, when they were walking in the soft dark she could bear it no longer. She caught at his hand, turning in to him and raising her face to his. In that moment she was both eager and afraid – afraid he would turn away, afraid that if he did kiss her the fragile shadow of glorious desire would fade. But Paul caught her arms, holding her against him, and when his mouth came down on hers she could almost have believed for a moment that he was Nicky. The scent of his skin was the same, the hard lines of his body were a dream made flesh. The dark lapping sea tipped up to meet the starless sky and Viv felt she was suspended somewhere between the two.
Such a little encounter – so little – she had to have more! She engineered, she planned, she seduced – and Paul, though he felt a little guilty, was a willing partner. Viv’s sexual attraction was intoxicating in itself; somehow the knowledge that she had been his brother’s girl gave an added sense of heady power so that he felt he could crush the world in the palm of his hand if he so chose.
Paul had always felt somewhat in Nicky’s shadow. Perhaps that is always the fate of the younger brother, continually running to try and keep up with the older sibling, the pace setter. And Nicky had always been such a golden boy, handsome and popular, good at everything he did. He had never shut Paul out, never tried to make him feel inferior, but the very niceness of his nature had compounded Paul’s insecurity. He could never be like Nicky, never do so well, never have people like him as much. He had felt clumsy, hopelessly inept, charging through childhood and floundering through puberty.
It was only when Nicky had left that Paul had begun to come into his own. His own rapid growth to manhood had coincided with his elevation to being the only Carteret son in Jersey and for the first time in his life Paul had begun to feel a certain selfconfidence. He had experimented with it – and with the power he seemed to have suddenly over the girls he met. They crowded round, making eyes, begging for his favours, making it clear how attractive they found him, and Paul grew in stature with every conquest.
But Vivienne Moran was something else again. She was not in the least like the girls who ran after him. In Paul’s eyes she was almost a goddess. He had admired her from afar when Nicky was dating her and she had further enhanced his brother in his eyes. Now he worshipped her. But it had simply never occurred to him that he might have her.
The first time he kissed her he was shaking inside with both terror and fierce longing. Mercifully he thought he had hidden it well – she had not known of his churning emotions. And to his utter amazement she seemed to want to kiss him again – not only kiss him either! In the darkness she would press her body against his until he thought he would go crazy with desire, and even encourage him to slide his hands up under her jumper. Touching the warm firm swell of her breasts Paul could think of nothing but what it would be like to make love to her. And afterwards there was always the thought that he was following in Nicky’s footsteps to keep the glow burning brightly.
Soon Paul was totally obsessed with Viv. He thought of her constantly and dreamed of being alone with her – really truly alone. But he did not tell any of the family that he was seeing her. His guilty conscience always stopped him from doing that however much he wanted to boast of their relationship because he knew that his parents, and probably Sophia too, would think that he was cheating on Nicky. And when Viv casually mentioned one evening that her mother was going to be away from home that weekend and suggested Paul might come to stay he certainly did not tell them that. Though he was beside himself with excitement he managed to keep a totally straight face as he made an excuse about staying the night with a friend from the bank and to his relief they seemed to believe him.
Like the Carterets
the Morans had been turned out of their home but they had been allowed to stay on in a cottage in the grounds which had been built for a housekeeper or gardener though it had never been used as such, and Loretta and Viv had continued to use their swimming pool and tennis courts, drawing a very fine line between fraternising with the German officers who occupied the house and antagonising them. There were those islanders who branded Loretta Moran a collaborator or even a Jerry Bag, as those women who were over-friendly with the Germans were called, but neither was strictly true. Loretta was a survivor – and still beautiful enough at the age of forty-five to be able to get her own way with men without actually giving anything in return.
She did however have a ‘friend’ at Rozel – an artist who had been a frequent visitor to the house for the famed pool parties she and Adrian had thrown in the balmy days before the war. Now, separated from her husband by circumstances for three years, the friendship had blossomed and Loretta occasionally spent weekends at Rozel. This weekend was one of them.
By the time he arrived at Viv’s home Paul was tight-strung with nervous anticipation. He knew very well what was going to happen and he was madly excited by the prospect of it but equally he was terrified that something would go wrong and he would disappoint Viv. In his pocket his perspiration-damp fingers curled around a precious packet of ‘French letters’ he had managed to track down – quite a feat in itself since the shortages did not stop with fuel, food and clothes. Though buying them had been horribly embarrassing the knowledge that the packet was there in his pocket made him feel manly and his confidence rose. At least Viv couldn’t accuse him of being careless! And if things didn’t work out as he hoped, if he had misread her intentions, then she need never know he had them.
Paul had never been to Viv’s home before and he was much impressed – and almost suffered another crisis of confidence! – when he saw the vast grounds which had been kept in trim by the Germans. Their own garden would have fitted into just a corner! But the cottage Viv and her mother had been allowed to live in was delightful – a small house in its own right, with bay windows and a log fire.