She picks up her knitting again; like dandelion seeds on the air, the memory of her sorrow has drifted away.
I change the time on our clocks. Then Blanche and I drag the mattresses back up the stairs.
Once Millie is tucked up in bed, Blanche comes to find me, in her dressing gown and pyjamas. She says she wants me to plait her hair, so it will curl in the morning.
She sits on the sofa beside me, with her back towards me. I start to plait her hair, which is silky and cool in my hands. The lamplight shines on its different colours—caramel-blonde, with pale buttery streaks where the summer sun has bleached it. I love doing this: it’s a way of touching that still feels comfortable for her. We don’t touch very often now—she’s withdrawn from me a little, being fourteen. I breathe in the scent of her—soap, and rose-geranium talc, and the sweet, particular, musky smell of her hair.
‘D’you know what it’ll be like, Mum?’ Her voice rather small and uncertain. ‘It’ll all be different, won’t it?’
I should be able to tell her: it’s what a mother should do—prepare her children, warn them. But I don’t know, can’t imagine. There is nothing I have ever been through that could prepare me for this.
‘Yes, it’ll be different. Well, a lot of things will be different.’
‘Will it be like that for ever?’
She has her back towards me and I can’t see her expression.
I don’t say anything.
‘Mum. I want to know. Will the Germans be here for ever? Is that what it’ll be like now?’
‘I don’t know, Blanche. Nobody knows what will happen.’
‘I’ve been praying about it,’ she says.
‘Oh. Have you, sweetheart?’
There’s a streak of religious devotion in Blanche, that I always find a surprise. We go to church every Sunday; for me, it’s mostly out of habit. But Blanche is devout, like Evelyn: she reads the Bible and prays. There’s a part of her that’s frivolous, loving dancing and stylish clothes, and a part that I only see sometimes, that’s reflective, rather serious.
‘It’s hard, though, isn’t it, Mum?’ she says now. ‘To know what to pray for—with everything that’s happening.’
‘Yes. It’s hard.’
‘I prayed that we’d go on the boat, and then we didn’t,’ she says.
There’s an edge of accusation in her voice. I know she’s still angry with me.
‘Sweetheart—that was a hard thing too. When I had to decide.’
She ignores this.
‘And sometimes I pray that we’ll win. But I expect the Germans do that too …’
‘Yes, I suppose so …’
‘Celeste reckons we’re going to win the war,’ she tells me. ‘She told me that. She said we mustn’t give up hope. But how can we, Mum? How can we possibly win?’
There are pictures in my mind: Hitler’s Victory March up the Champs Elysées in Paris, which we saw on a newsreel at the Gaumont in town. The massed ranks of Nazi soldiers surging onwards, like a force of nature, like a storm or flood—utterly invincible.
I fix a rubber band around the end of her plait.
‘You ought to go to bed,’ I say.
She stands and turns to face me. With her hair in a plait she looks younger, her cheeks full and flushed, like a child’s—like when she was only seven, and still played in the Blancs Bois with Johnnie. Her face is troubled. She turns and goes up the stairs.
The next morning I clean my bedroom. It isn’t long since I last cleaned it—I just need something to occupy me. The work isn’t very vigorous, but my heart is beating too fast.
My bedroom is a pleasant room. The wallpaper has a pattern of cabbage roses, and there’s a taffeta eiderdown on the big double bed, and on my dressing table, all the special things I’ve collected: a perfume bottle that has a dragonfly glass stopper; my silver hairbrush and comb; a music box that I’ve had since I was a child. The music box was my mother’s. It has an Impressionist painting on it, two girls at a piano in a hazy, pretty room, all the colours running together as though they are melting and wet. It plays Für Elise, the sound at once ethereal and clunky, because you can hear the abrasion of all the tiny parts inside. The music always calls up a feeling of sweetness and yearning in me—a window open, a muslin curtain billowing, brown hair blown over a mouth—conjuring up the lavender scent of the past. Just a trace of memory, and a longing I can’t satisfy. Playing this music is the nearest I can come to the mother I lost.
This bedroom is at the front of the house; from the window, you can see out over my yard, and the roof and front garden of Les Vinaires next door. I dust the sill, looking out. Connie loved plants, and her garden is full of the loveliest things—honeysuckle, and fuchsias, and Oriental poppies, their colours singing together, scarlet and amber and pink, so vivid, and fading so quickly, just one day in flower and then a bright blown litter of petals over the lawn. But the garden is looking neglected already, grass straggling into the borders, the roses gangly and reaching out over the path, all the neat boundaries blurring and lost—everything grows so fast in high summer. I remember Connie saying, ‘Keep an eye on things for me, won’t you, Viv?’ I feel guilty that I’d forgotten. I ought to try and do something—weed the borders, cut the grass. I tie a knot in my handkerchief to remind me.
A sound comes through my open window—the chunter of an engine drawing nearer down the lane. My pulse quickens. Someone must be disobeying the rules and using a car; whoever it is may be endangering us. I wait to see who will drive past.
But as I watch, a German vehicle draws up at Les Vinaires. Two men in uniform get out. They stand talking for a moment in the profound wet shade of the lane. A little wind ruffles the leaves and the shadows of leaves dance over them. I feel a sense of shock, my heart drumming, to see these invaders standing there, surrounded by the secret gardens and orchards of these deep valleys. Just as Blanche said, these men are tall, much taller than island men. The sunlight glints on their buckles and jackboots and the guns at their belts. They look entirely out-of-place in the leaf-dappled light, amid the cowpats and the potholes, between the hedgebanks with their jumble of leaves and entangled flowers and briars.
They open the gate of Les Vinaires, walk up the path to the door. They seem too big for the garden. I notice that one of them has a clipboard in his hand. There’s a bang and a crack as the other man breaks the lock of the door.
Rage surges through me, and a hot flaring shame: that I can’t stop them, can’t protect Connie’s house from them. That I’m so utterly helpless.
In a little while they come out again, and go back down the path. My rage is blotted out by fear: it’s as though a small cold hand is fingering the back of my neck. Angie’s words are there in my mind. They crucify girls. They rape them and crucify them … What if these soldiers come in here and take our house, as well? They own us, they can do as they wish, they could walk in anywhere—there’s nothing to stop them, nothing.
But
