My throat is thick. ‘Something’s happened …’
She stares at my face. She knows at once.
‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’
‘Yes. I’m so sorry.’
She sinks down. She’s trying to hold to the door post, but her hands slide down, her body collapses in on itself, as though she has no bones. I can’t hold her. I bring a chair and pull her up onto it. I kneel beside her.
‘I was in town today. Frank was there with his lorry. They bombed the pier and I found him. Angie—I was with him, I was holding him when he died.’
She wraps her hands around one another, wrings them. Her mouth is working, but she can’t speak. There are no tears in her eyes, but her face looks all wrong—damaged.
At last she tries to clear her throat.
‘Did he—say anything?’ Her voice is hoarse, and muffled as though there’s a blanket over her mouth. ‘Did he have a message for me, Vivienne?’
I don’t know what to tell her. I think of his last words. Fucking bastards.
I take her hand in mine. Her skin is icy cold; the cold in her goes through me.
‘He died very quickly, he wouldn’t have suffered,’ I say.
She moves her head very slightly. I can tell she doesn’t believe me.
‘Come back with me, I’ll give you a meal,’ I tell her.
‘No, Vivienne,’ she says. ‘It’s so kind of you, but I won’t …’
‘I think you should,’ I tell her. ‘You can’t stay here all alone.’
‘I’ll be all right,’ she says. ‘I just need some time on my own, to take it in.’
‘I don’t like to leave you,’ I say.
‘Really, Vivienne. Don’t you worry. In a bit I’ll take myself over to Mabel and Jack’s.’
Mabel and Jack Bisson have four children; their house will be busy and boisterous. But Angie is insistent.
I leave her sitting alone by her hearth, wringing her hands as though she is wringing out cloth.
I cook tea for Evelyn and the girls, though I can’t eat anything. Then Blanche helps me bring the girls’ mattresses down from their rooms, and I make up beds for both of them in the narrow space under the stairs. This is the strongest part of the house, its spine.
‘Look,’ I tell Millie, trying to keep my voice casual. ‘Tonight you and Blanche will be camping under the stairs. I’ve made you a den to sleep in.’
She frowns.
‘Is it so we won’t get killed? When the Germans come and bomb us?’
I don’t know what to tell her.
‘It’s just to be on the safe side,’ I say vaguely.
I decide to leave Evelyn in her room—I know I couldn’t persuade her to sleep in a different place. And I think I too will stay upstairs: I can’t believe I’ll sleep at all, and even if I do doze off, if anything happens I’ll wake.
I sit at the kitchen table, light a cigarette. I remember that there’s some cooking brandy in the kitchen cupboard; it’s left over from Christmas, when I put some in my mince pies. I don’t drink alcohol often, but I pour myself a glass. The brandy has a festive smell, which feels troublingly wrong for the day, but I feel a little calmer as the drink slides into my veins, all my sadness blurring over.
I sit there for a long time, smoking, drinking, my body loosening, trying not to think. At last I get up to go to bed. As I take the glass to the sink to wash, it simply slips from my hand, falls to the floor, shatters. The dangerous sound of breaking glass triggers something in me: I suddenly find I am weeping. I sob and sob, as I kneel on the floor and sweep up the glittery shards. I feel as though I will never stop weeping.
I check on the girls before I go up to my room. Blanche is asleep but Millie’s eyes are wide open; the light is still on in the kitchen, and slivers of gold from the half-open door reflect in the dark of her eyes.
‘Mummy, they’re going to kill us, aren’t they?’ she says, in a hissing, melodramatic whisper, so as not to wake Blanche. ‘They’re going to come in the night and bomb us to bits.’
‘No, sweetheart. I don’t think they will.’
‘Why are we sleeping here, then?’ she says.
‘We’re just being sensible,’ I tell her.
She gives me a doubtful look.
I lie awake for a long time. Nothing happens. There are no planes: all I hear is the creaking of my house as it settles and turns in its sleep, and outside the deepening quiet of the Guernsey summer night, depth on depth of quiet. But my anger keeps me awake. I feel a blind, furious rage—rage against this violence, when there weren’t any soldiers here, when we couldn’t fight back. I think how they slaughtered Frank like an animal—Frank who I didn’t much like, who maybe wasn’t such a good man, but who shouldn’t have died, who was too young to die, and who died such a terrible death. How they could come in the night and kill my children. How they will walk in, enslave us, take our island for their own.
I sleep for a while, and wake again, with a start, as though something disturbed me. I get up and go to the window. The moon hangs down like a fruit, and moonlight whitens everything. It’s so bright there are exact leaf-shadows on my gravel, and the hollyhocks in the flowerbeds of Les Vinaires next door are pale, almost luminous—ghost flowers.
I press my face to the pane. All the anger has left me. There’s a cold sweat of fear on my skin. I think—What have I done? We could be in London, in Iris’s house. Have I made the worst mistake of my life? Oh, my God—what have I done?
Sunday evening. I weed my garden while Millie plays on the lawn. She tries to make a daisy chain, but her fingers aren’t yet clever enough and the stalks keep splitting right through. She leaves the daisies lying there, and plays for a while with her ball, practising throwing and catching. The ball is striped with colours and makes a vivid blur as it falls.
The day cools as the sun sinks down. I pull my cardigan close around me. Evenings can be cold on Guernsey, even in high summer—there’s often a freshness in the air, a chill that blows off the sea. A little movement of air shivers the leaves of the mulberry tree, and shadow clots and thickens beneath the elms in the hedge that shield the top part of our garden from the garden of Les Vinaires. The sky is purple as amethyst and streaked with rose-coloured cloud, and I can hear a nightingale in my orchard over the lane, its song spilling out like bright water-drops.
A distant growl of aircraft noise disturbs me. I look up. Six planes are circling in the
