At the Edge of Summer (21 page)

The soldiers guarding the little cellar were hunched over by the door, rain dripping off the brim of their round helmets. One straightened at my approach. The other lit a cigarette.

“What do you want?” he said, tossing his match.

“I'm bringing writing materials to the prisoners.”

The first one tipped back his helmet. “I thought you were busy making great art.”

“Chaffre, what are you doing here?” I asked.

“Guess.” He looked unhappy. He'd pulled guard duty with Martel, the brute who'd hated him since our training days. “Did you eat that soup?”

“I forgot.”

“You also forgot your helmet again.”

I shrugged. “I could use a bath.”

Martel snorted. “Is he your
maman,
Crépet? Or maybe your girlfriend?”

“Fuck off,” I said, but my face burned. Chaffre never did his fussing in front of others.

“I dunno. You've always jumped to defend him.” He took his cigarette out and spit. “Like some damsel-in-distress.”

I started for him, but Chaffre stepped between us. “It's nothing.” In the moonlight his eyes were pleading.

I stopped, but Martel chuckled and strolled away for a piss.

Chaffre lifted his helmet and wiped his brow. “He's a bastard.”

“He is. But, hey, don't rag on me all the time.” I regretted it the moment I said it.

His eyes flickered. “I'm looking out for you. Isn't that what we're supposed to be doing out here?”

I forced a smile. “Sure.”

Something clattered onto the ground and I bent to pick it up. Chaffre's little lead Madonna, the one he carried everywhere. For him to be holding it, out here in the rain, to be worrying and praying, something must still be nagging at him.

“It'll feel like summer again someday,” I said, and held it out.

He pushed the little figure into his pocket. “Someday.” He shifted his rifle. “So what are you doing here? If I were you, I would be sleeping instead.”

“Delivering writing materials to the prisoners.” I kept my book covered with my hand. “I have orders.”

I didn't tell him that the orders were nothing more than a plea from an old friend. I couldn't explain, not even to Chaffre.

“Your own paper? You're wasting it on them?”

I hated lying to him. “Yeah,” I said, glad it was dark.

He hesitated. Rain pinged off his helmet. “Okay, but make it quick. I think they're asleep.”

They were, but it was a wary doze that ended when I opened the door and let in a sweep of windy rain down the cellar steps. I couldn't see more than the splash of moonlight let me, but one of the figures got heavily to his feet. “Crépet, you came back.”

I picked my way down the steps. “For a minute. I brought what you asked.” I fumbled for the book inside my greatcoat. “I can't stay. I shouldn't even be here.”

His reply was in English, low and guarded, almost private. “Thank you for helping me.”

Gratitude, I didn't expect. Not from Bauer. Not now. He'd never thanked anyone in all the years I knew him. I dropped the pencil. “It's nothing.”

He moved closer, just a little bit. I couldn't see more than a shadow of his face. “It's more than you know.” His eyes glittered in the dark.

I bent and felt along the floor. Rain beat against the stairs from the open door. Outside, Chaffre paced, sending his shadow across the floor. Bauer stepped nearer. I wished I hadn't come.

“Do you remember some of the tricks we'd pull on the court?” he asked, squatting by me.

I edged back. This sudden nearness, this gratitude, this nostalgic remember-when. “You were always much more serious about the game than I was.” From outside, Chaffre cleared his throat loudly. “You always wanted to win.” My fingers connected with the pencil and I straightened.

Bauer stood, and as he did, the others did, too. I took a step back, my heels against the stairs, realizing that I'd dropped the pencil again.

“It's really not so different these days, is it?” he said. “We all want to win.” He clapped a hand on my left shoulder.

“The game ended long ago.” I twisted my body away from his hand.

But I'd forgotten about Bauer's drop shot. I'd forgotten that he always knew how to set me up to lose.

Clare had told me not to trust him. I wished I had listened.

When he put his hand on my shoulder and I twisted away, I didn't see it coming. I didn't realize I'd left my hip open. Bauer lunged and metal grated. He swung up with my bayonet in his fist.

I swerved, I tried. I didn't move as fast as he did. That same forehand that won him 299 games caught me full across the left side of my face.

The bayonet was long, edged to the hilt, with a curved quillon. He held it thrust-down when he swung, the way he'd pulled it from the scabbard. The quillon slammed into my nose, snapping my head to the side. The blade hissed cold through my cheek.

I caught myself against the wall, against slime-slick rocks.

“You've never understood ‘enemy,' Crépet,” Bauer said, leaning in close. “You have always trusted too much.”

Behind me the others had moved in to block my exit. My head spun but I pushed myself off the wall.

“The little fräulein, she trusted me, too.” His eyes gleamed in the dim. “Someone had to show her Paris.”

I could still see Clare hunched in that doorway without her hat. “You…” Dizzy, I pulled the chisel from my belt and lunged at him. He ducked easily. With the bayonet still in hand, he backhanded. Like a wire through clay, the blade sliced through my shoulder until it jarred against bone. The chisel clattered away.

“Three hundred,” he whispered. He shoved me off the bayonet, against the wall. My head cracked against the wet stones as I fell, and I saw stars. He leaned down close. “I win.”

I tried to push myself up, to call out a warning to Chaffre, but Bauer squared an almost offhand kick at my mouth. Hobnails tore into my already-cut cheek and I swallowed the cry.

The others waiting by the door parted and let him up the stairs. Someone bent for the chisel, someone else for the pencil. Moonlight skittered across the floor as they followed him up.

I pushed myself up with my left arm, coughing blood. Outside, shadows jerked.

“Luc!” I thought I heard, but the sound was pulled away into the wind.

Something fell through the doorway and down the stairs, something heavy with a round helmet that clattered away. The door slammed shut, throwing the cellar into a thick darkness, but I was already pulling myself up the rocks to my knees, already crawling over.

“Who is it?” I whispered, but got no response. I felt shoes, legs, a long French greatcoat soaked with a night's guard duty in the rain. Buttons straight and neat. Wool sticky and warm, but beneath, faintly, the rise and fall of a chest. “Oh, please. Chaffre.”

I pushed down, feeling ribs, hot blood, and a jagged tear. It was nothing, was it? Such a small hole. I could hold all the blood in. I stretched my hands over the wound and tried to swallow down any doubts. All he'd wanted was to be strong enough for all of this. I'd hold him together if I had to.

But his hands scrabbled at mine, pulled my fingers up and away. He brought them to his lips. Against the back of my hand, I felt rasping breaths and an exhaled, “Go.”

“I'm not leaving,” I said, though my jaw ached to move. From his pocket, I took the little lead Madonna. “Here.” I tucked the figure into the hand that held mine.

“Luc.” He inhaled raggedly, then gave a cough. Like a breath, his lips brushed my knuckles. His grip loosened. When I pulled my hand away, it held the lead statue.

I don't know how long it took to crawl up the stairs, how much strength it took to push that door open, how far I staggered before I found Martel, coming out of the woods buttoning his fly.

“Jesus, Crépet.” He caught me as I stumbled.

“Chaffre,” I tried to say. “In the cellar.” But the words were as shattered as my jaw.

He stared. “Is all that blood yours?”

“They got away,” I managed to say before sliding into blackness.

A
s far as Glasgow was from the war, I saw both ends of it every day. Buchanan Street and Queen Street stations teemed with raw soldiers from all corners of Scotland, scrubbed and hopeful. Glasgow Central brought them back, worn, weary, wary. There were whispers that some of the trains unloaded their cargo far from the center of the city, where no one would be disturbed by the sight of gurneys and bandages. Scotland's brave soldiers could appear nothing less.

Mostly, though, the streets were full of women. Brisk, serious nurses, ruddy shipbuilders and munitions workers, black-draped widows, the occasional Belgian or French refugee. Every day I passed by St. Aloysius' Church, full of women and their quiet contemplation. Though I wasn't Catholic, sometimes I joined them.

I was so far from the war, yet I felt so near to it with each person I passed in the street, with each troop train waiting at the station, with each pasted newspaper headline, with each kilted soldier, desperate couple, handkerchief pressed to eyes. The breathless, headlong rush of war, brought straight to Scotland.

I kept that smudged map in my pocket, the one I'd torn from the newspaper in Saint-Louis. I kept it to remind myself that the war was just as close for me. Somewhere in France was a soldier I still thought of.

I
never knew independence could feel so lonely.

In Glasgow, I didn't have sand or sunshine or the smells of coffee and spices. I didn't have blue skies stretching upwards forever. I didn't have companionable quiet at the supper table. I didn't have Grandfather.

I did have a narrow bed in a rooming house, a crooked desk too far away from the window, a gas ring that never completely warmed my kettle. The other female students, those fresh from under their fathers' thumbs, rejoiced. “A tiny flat?” they'd exclaim to one another. “But it's
my
tiny flat.” The only thing that made it mine was the wooden mask hanging on the wall, the one I'd brought back from Mauritania. I'd been to Africa and back. The other women had only made it as far as Glasgow. Listening at the edges of these conversations, I felt lonelier for not understanding.

My first day at the School of Art, I was bewildered. The clean, echoing halls, the well-ordered studios, the big, bright rooms and their high ceilings. I'd been used to painting in the souks of North Africa, strapping an easel onto the back of my bicycle and mixing pigments in the jostle of the crowd as the colors presented themselves. I'd brushed sand from my canvas and picked blown grass from the paint on my makeshift palette. I'd crouched on the banks of the Senegal River, sculpting brown clay. Now, I held my leather case to my chest as I made my way through the pillared front hall of the school, wondering how art could be created in such a sterile place. I wondered how I'd ever find the warmth and color and
life
that I had on my travels.

I thought I could find it in the students. Young women flocked the halls in excited, chattering bunches, exhilarated at being on their own, at being here, at walking the halls of artists. Some were so young. Their dresses high-necked, their hair braided down their backs, they couldn't have been long out of the schoolroom. I could scarcely keep up with their nattering. I followed them, soaking in their radiance, wishing I'd had even one girlfriend in my life to know how it was done. Once in the basement corridor, a girl turned to me, mistaking me for someone in her group, and asked whether I agreed that the Artists Football Club was smashing. By the time I accidentally responded in French, she had already moved on down the hallway.

I was no better with the male students. All I'd had for comparison was Luc. Well, Luc and my grandfather. Both quiet, introspective, absorbed. I didn't find that here. The few male students left in Glasgow were boys—restless, impatient boys. They always kept half a watch out for the news, waiting to see if they'd be called for their turn. I couldn't blame them, I suppose. With nearly everyone else over the age of eighteen in the army, they wanted to be next. The older students were those turned down at the recruitment bureau, and they kept their heads down, hiding a weak heart or spirit. I couldn't talk to them, any of them, not when they made me think of someone else, someone who hadn't escaped the army.

I wrote to Madame when I arrived in Glasgow. I knew she'd be proud, and of course I wanted news of Luc. I tried to sound casual, as though I'd simply misplaced Luc like an errant glove, not that I was so wracked with worry every night that I fell asleep praying for him. I asked where I could write to him, as I had so much to tell.

But she never wrote back, though I tried and tried. I kept watching that map I'd cut out of that newspaper in Saint-Louis, watching the blots of ink march across the landscape, far too near to Mille Mots. Was she even receiving my letters? Was I receiving hers?

While I sat in the still life studio one day, early for class and tracing the lines on my crumpled map, a girl came up behind. “Have a sweetheart over there?” she asked.

I could hardly remember how his voice sounded and, while I had no trouble sketching out the boyish face I knew—all angles and dark curls—I didn't know how the older Luc looked, hardened by war. “A sweetheart?” I folded the newspaper clipping. “No, a friend. A friend I miss very much.”

I wanted him to be there. I wanted him to be on the other end of an envelope to share this with me, the way he had been. This, art school, was something he'd always wanted for me, harder than he ever wanted something for himself. This was ours, and I wanted, more than anything, to write to him all about it.

I'd tell Luc how hard it was. Not just the loneliness—that, I knew he'd understand—but the lessons.

I thought it would be easy. Really, I did. I had training, right there at the table of Monsieur Claude Crépet. I'd had further lectures via letter, once every few months, on my technique. I'd sketched and painted across continents. I'd spent years feeling my way through the learning. I'd had a mother who could turn tables into fairy tales, a father who could make buildings rise with pencils and measurements, and a grandmother who had captured a marriage on canvas. Art was in my blood and in my fingertips.

Half of the young women here were like me, experienced, taught at art academies or under private drawing masters. They also carried well-worn cases. The others, hopeful and untutored, their pencils freshly sharpened, their brushes new, I was sure would be the ones fumbling. Little did I know that I'd fumble, too.

Miss Ross, you cannot hold the pencil as though you were writing,
or,
When you insist on keeping your paper at that angle, you smudge with your palm, every time,
or,
While arranging your palette, you mustn't put raw sienna beside raw umber. There is an
order
to these things, Miss Ross.
The well-trained students never made these errors. The untrained were taught from the start how not to. But I'd had one summer of proper lessons and then years of filling in the rest by myself. I had to be corrected and instructed all over again. I hated it.

If I'd had an address, I could've written to Luc about all of that. The embarrassment of being told that, yet again, I was doing it wrong. The frustration of learning a second time what I'd already learned once. The isolation of being the only one so singled out.

Or I could have written to him about the parts that weren't all that bad. Of sketching a live model for the first time, and then a live nude model. Of learning modeling in the dusty, clay-streaked sculpture studio. Of putting on that crisp white artists' smock the very first time and seeing it satisfyingly spotted with paint at the end of the lesson. Of being, every single day, surrounded by art. Luc was right; that, I loved.

Until I could find him, until I could write to him, I'd keep all of that tight against my chest. I didn't want anyone else to see these little joys before Luc did. If he did. So I tucked away my disappointments and I tucked away each scrap of happiness as I found it. I focused on my hard-earned place at the School of Art, a place I knew Luc would've envied. Every picture I drew, every sculpture I smoothed, I did it for him. Even without being there, Luc was always my muse.