so. I’m so terribly sorry.’ He looked as if he wanted to say something else but closed his mouth, clearly thinking better of it.
In the shock that hit Persey she thought she knew what he’d been about to say: Why didn’t you telephone earlier? It was a question she now asked herself. She hadn’t been quick enough. Hadn’t seen the signs in time, had let the fever rage for too long. And now … if she stayed standing here and didn’t move, it wouldn’t be real. If she didn’t go into her mother’s room and see her, in bed, no longer breathing … it wouldn’t be real, wouldn’t have actually happened.
‘But …’ Sobs prevented her speaking until she eventually uttered, ‘But … I was only gone from the house for half an hour. An hour, at most. I think. She can’t … in that time?’
Doctor Durand was spared answering as Dido appeared at the stairs.
‘Oh, Dido,’ Persey cried. Dido stumbled past Doctor Durand and down the stairs towards her sister, who was still rooted to the floor, and the two embraced.
‘It’s my fault. I should have …’ Persey started.
‘It’s not your fault, Persey, it’s not,’ Dido said into Persey’s hair between sobs. Persey felt her sister’s tear-streaked face dampen her own.
Dido pulled back from her sister and looked past her towards the front door. But it was only when Persey caught Doctor Durand looking in the same direction that she felt compelled to turn and follow their collective gaze.
Her eyes were blurred with tears and so Persey wasn’t able to make out the features of the man standing in the doorway, or those of the two other men behind him. But the uniform told her all she needed to know. That dark jacket, belted at the waist, eagle insignias embroidered onto the breast and the peaked cap that shielded the man’s eyes. His head was tipped down as if … ashamed? No, Persey thought. But if not that, then what?
He spoke perfect English in a German accent that should have surprised Persey but didn’t. He was German. Of course he was. And he was in the entrance hall of Deux Tourelles.
‘I appear to have called at a difficult time,’ he said.
‘Yes, you bloody have,’ Dido cried. ‘How dare—?’
Persey grabbed her sister’s hand, clutching it tightly, stopping Dido from saying anything she shouldn’t in the presence of the enemy. But she herself was unable to speak, unable to save the situation. She blinked in disbelief at the past few minutes, at the sudden loss of her mother and the surprising arrival of the Germans not only on the island but also at her front door, their jackbooted feet on the welcome mat of their home.
She nodded, only able to whisper an almost silent, ‘Yes. It is a dreadful time.’ She gulped back tears. ‘We have had a death.’
‘Then I apologise at my poor timing.’ He looked behind him at the two men who had accompanied him, his face now cast in the shadow from the peak of his cap. ‘I will return tomorrow.’
Persey’s eyes fogged with fresh tears. She wanted to say no and to shout, Don’t you dare come back. But she couldn’t speak anymore. She wiped her eyes and nodded as the three men turned and walked nonchalantly down the drive towards the car parked at the gate as if they hadn’t a care in the world.
‘What in God’s name do you think they wanted?’ Doctor Durand was the first to speak.
‘I don’t know,’ Persey whispered, confusion rattling around inside her mind.
‘We’ll find out tomorrow,’ Dido said quietly.
It was real. The Germans were here, the arrival of the enemy was upon them and Persey knew she would forever remember the day her mother died as the day the Germans arrived.
In bed later, Persey was unable to sleep, unable to cry anymore, unable to think. Visions of her mother holding her as a child, buckling her shoes for her on her first day at school, fixing her grazed knee when she’d fallen from the tree house at the end of the garden. That tree house was gone now. So was her mother.
She stared at the ceiling and then in an exhausted resignation moved to the window, lifting the tight-fitting blackout blind out of place and staring down the driveway towards the field in the distance and the single cottage that bordered their small, two-acre grounds. It had been abandoned only yesterday by the Jewish owners, who had sailed to England to escape the Nazis. If it hadn’t been for the moon casting a bright light down onto the pasture she’d not have been able to see anything but she’d have known what she was looking at; the view imprinted on her memory. She’d been born in this house. She’d never known anything else, never wanted anything else.
Her mind wandered aimlessly as she placed the thick blackout frame silently on the carpet of her room. The Germans were here now; why was the blind needed? But Mrs Grant had a copy of the Evening Press with the horrific announcements from the occupying force littering the pages. Things were to continue in much the same way, for now. Tonight the blackout wasn’t in place to prevent the Germans from bombing Guernsey – it was to prevent the British from bombing the island and driving the Germans into submission.
Unthinkable really, that the British would bomb Guernsey now. But then, prior to the last few weeks it had been unthinkable that the Germans would occupy Guernsey, yet it had happened. So why not the former?
‘The world has turned upside down,’ she whispered to herself. She looked towards the garage, its wide doors left open. She hadn’t closed the house properly for the night and she stared as the moonlight bounced a silver light off the bonnet of her father’s car, taunting her, telling her that she had let everyone down today by letting her mother die and now, her father’s car was visible to any German who wanted to take it; inconsequential as it was in the grand scheme of things.
Persey pulled her dressing gown from the hook behind her door and made her way along the landing. She stopped at her mother’s closed door and put her hand against it. The undertaker had been – promptly summoned by Doctor Durand – and her mother was no longer in the house but still Persey didn’t know why the door had been closed. She opened it wide and looked in. The pain was too great in her chest, looking at her mother’s things, items that she knew her mother would never touch again. Her hairbrush on the dressing table, her book – open and face down. Her mother had been too weak to read it for so long. How had Persey not registered that? Her mother’s face flashed in her mind and, guiltily, Persey closed the door again and with it closed her own eyes, hoping it would take the pain away. But it didn’t.
Doctor Durand had said there was nothing he could have done. The influenza had taken over and her mother’s lungs, weakened from when she’d caught tuberculosis as a child, had been the root cause of her demise. But still Persey blamed herself. Why hadn’t she telephoned earlier? Why? There might have been something Doctor Durand could have done.
She continued downstairs towards the garage. She would shut the doors and return to bed to try and force sleep to come. But as she closed the first door she heard a noise at the back of the garage where her father’s tools still hung. She stood still. It had sounded as if someone had backed into the wall and knocked one of the spades or rakes hanging from the tool hooks. The clatter of metal on brick died out as quickly as it had started, as if someone had grabbed at the implement to silence the noise.
As soon as the word ‘Hello?’ fell from her lips she knew it had been a mistake to speak. She turned to run away but wasn’t quick enough. Her foot had barely moved an inch before she saw someone
