The Collaborator (17 page)

W
e work out the rules. I leave a signal for him—an empty flowerpot on my doorstep, to let him know that it is safe, that everyone is in bed here. If he does come round to my house, it is always exactly at ten; if he hasn’t arrived by quarter past, I go up to bed on my own.

I have lived for so long in a house of women: I’m astonished to have a man again in my bed, so grateful for the warm weight of his solid body, the subtle scent of his skin, his difference. Astonished too by the way I am with him—when I always think of myself as being so shy, so reserved. Yet with this man I will do anything—open up, be shameless: as though I have a different body when I am with him; as though I am changed by his nearness.

After we have made love, we will always talk for a while, me with my head on his shoulder. In the gentle light of my candles, the room will seem secret and separate—a cave in a forest, a boat on a shifting sea. You can hear all the creaks and stirrings of the old house settling down to sleep, as a boat will creak at anchor.

He will take two cigarettes, light one for him and one for me. Mostly we talk about the past—which is safer than the present.

‘What were you like when you were a child?’ he asks me. ‘Tell me about your childhood.’

He blows out smoke. The peacefulness of the moment laps around us. I love to see him here, in my bed, loving the things I know about his body: the patterning of hair on his chest, the way his spine shows through his white skin, the cords of his wrists, a kind of grace in his gestures; and the startling smile that will suddenly light up his face. He feels familiar to me already—as though he is part of me, as though I have always been waiting for him.

I tell him about Iris, about growing up in London in the tall, thin house with the hidden garden piled up with the leaves of all the years; about the aunts who brought us up.

‘My mother died very suddenly, when I was three,’ I tell him. ‘She had pneumonia.’

He doesn’t say anything. He puts his arm round me, pulls me close. He waits.

I’m remembering. It’s suddenly so vivid to me; I can smell the chill, antiseptic smell of the sickroom. There’s an ache that seems to rise like dough in my chest.

‘We were taken in to say goodbye—me and my sister,’ I tell him.

I find I am starting to cry. As though the hard shell that protects me has been softened by his presence. I haven’t spoken about this grief for years.

He wipes the tear from my face with one warm finger.

‘You were so young,’ he says quietly. ‘To have to face such a thing.’

It’s all there in my head, with a sudden, troubling precision.

‘The room smelt funny and she looked strange. She didn’t look like my mother any more … I’ve learned since, how—when you go to see someone who’s ill, sometimes you
know,
you can tell … You know that they will die soon. You can tell, they look different.’

‘Yes, I have seen that,’ he says.

‘I suppose I saw that in my mother,’ I say. ‘Though I had no way of understanding it.’

He strokes my hair. The touch, the rhythm, soothe me.

‘That was very difficult for you,’ he says. ‘For your mother to die when you were still so young … I have felt from the beginning that there was something hurt in you,’ he tells me. ‘Something withdrawn, reserved. Waiting to be drawn out. Even from that very first time I saw you in the lane.’

‘Did you? Did you really think that, even then?’ I say. ‘Tell me …’

Afterwards, I am glad that I told him about my mother. I don’t understand why this should be so consoling; but it is. As though telling him has freed me.

At night, our intimacy seems completely natural to me—as though it is all intended, how my life is meant to unfold. But sometimes I’ll see him during the day—in the requisitioned Bentley, or with the other soldiers, perhaps laughing with Hans Schmidt or Max Richter, in that loud, rather raucous way that men will laugh with other men, and he’ll seem so utterly
separate from me, and the realisation of what I am doing slams into me.

I’ll think, What is he like with those other people—those enemy soldiers—doing whatever they do to keep our island under control? Do I really know him? What does it mean to know someone? And whenever I think this, I’ll hear Blanche’s voice in my mind:
How can you ever really know someone? How can you ever be sure what they’re like?

One day I ask him.

‘What are you like when you’re not with me?’ He smiles a little at my question.

‘None of us knows that,’ he says, lightly. ‘How could we? That is a problem for everyone. We never know what the person we love is like when they aren’t with us.’

‘No, of course, but—we aren’t
everyone …’
My voice fades.

He can tell that his answer didn’t quite satisfy me. A new seriousness comes in his face.

‘My darling, that is a very difficult question. You would need a philosopher to answer that question,’ he says.

I wish he’d be clearer.

I lie on my side, looking at him. On the dressing table behind him, the dragonfly on my perfume bottle is lit up by the candlelight, so it looks as though it’s burning. His face in profile is featureless, black, against the fiery wings.

‘I know so little about you really,’ I say.

‘What do you want to know?’ he says.

I hesitate. My head is a tangle of questions, and I can’t pull out the right one. I retreat to something safer.

‘Tell me about Germany,’ I say. ‘I’ve never been there.’

‘Some of Germany is beautiful,’ he says.

‘Tell me about the beautiful parts,’ I say.

‘Bavaria is beautiful,’ he says. ‘My wife’s uncle lives in Bavaria. We would go there in the summer—before the war, before it all began. There is no air like the air of those forests. The pines, the smell of juniper. There is no silence like that silence …’

I try to imagine them—those great forests, the scent of juniper and pine. I’m ignorant, like a child; I know so little of the world.

‘Berlin presses down,’ he says. ‘All the big buildings, and people living on top of one another. I don’t like to spend too long there. I like to go far away. Not to have to think about things …’

I remember the poem I chose for him.
I have asked to be/ Where no storms come.
Perhaps it wasn’t quite such an inappropriate choice as I’d thought. Perhaps there was a kind of rightness to it.

‘I like to draw and paint there, in Bavaria,’ he tells me. ‘To set up my easel on the mountainside. To have a whole day of quiet there, with my charcoal or my paints … There are moments when you don’t have to try—when there is no struggle. You are there in the place where you should be, and everything flows like water, the scene forming under your hand …’

I think how everyone has a dream that sustains them: a thought that begins,
When the war is over …
And for him the dream is there, amid those forests and that silence. That is where he has left a part of himself—on a mountainside in Bavaria, with his easel and his brushes and his little tubes of colours; with the scent of juniper and the silence.

I say this to him.

‘That is where you would be now—if you could choose,’ I tell him.

He is quiet for a moment.

‘No, Vivienne,’ he says then. He turns to look into my face: there’s such intensity in him. ‘You see—maybe as you said, you know so little about me. Of all the places that I could choose, I would be here, in this bed.’

T
here’s a letter on my doormat, in an envelope that has no name or address. I wonder who dropped it off here, and why they didn’t stay to speak. I open the envelope. There’s a single sheet of paper inside it, folded in half. I open it out. The room tilts around me.

The message is made from newsprint letters cut from
The Guernsey Press
and glued down on the paper. The letters are crooked, at drunken angles, as though stuck down haphazardly, all in a rush: but the message is horribly clear.
Viv de la Mare is a Jerrybag!!!’
The harsh words scream out at me.

I put the letter down quickly on the hall table, as though the touch of it could hurt, as though it could sear me like acid. But I know I can’t leave it lying there, where anyone could see. I pick it up again and take it through to the living room and screw it up and throw it on the fire. The paper opens out as it falls, and catches light, a red line of flame running round it. As I watch it flares and blackens and collapses into ash. I can’t think—don’t want to think—who could have sent it.

The floor creaks behind me as Evelyn comes into the room. She sits carefully in her chair and pulls her knitting from her basket.

‘Something’s burning,’ she says. ‘What’s burning there? I can smell it. Something’s burning in the grate.’ ‘It’s nothing, Evelyn,’ I say. ‘Don’t worry.’ ‘Who’s burning a letter?’ she says.

She can see the charred paper in the grate. I poke the fire, break up the ashy fragments. Even now it’s completely burned I still see it in my mind’s eye. The skewed newsprint letters, the ugly words.
‘Viv de la Mare is a Jerrybag!!!’

‘It’s not a letter,’ I say. ‘It’s nothing. Just an old drawing of Millie’s.’

I suddenly wonder how Evelyn knows it was a letter. Did she see it on the doormat? Did she see the person who brought it, from her bedroom window that looks out over the lane? But I can’t ask if she saw anyone, can’t find out who left it here, because I’ve already told her that there wasn’t a letter at all.

She starts on her knitting. Her fingers move briskly, her knitting needles make a quick stern sound: like a reprimand.

‘Something’s burning,’ she says again. ‘I can smell it. I don’t like that smell, Vivienne. Something’s been thrown on the fire.’

‘Shh, Evelyn. Everything’s all right.’

She’s quiet for a moment. I think—What will happen to me? How many people know, and who will they tell? I imagine how people would condemn me if they knew about my love affair; I think of the stares, the coldness—how Evelyn and Gwen and even my children would turn away from me. It’s hard to
breathe. I’m worried that Evelyn will see all my guilt and my fear in my face.

She stops her knitting suddenly, the needles held downwards in front of her. Her hands are loose: the stitches start to slide. I move towards her, worried that her knitting will unravel and upset her.

‘Where’s Eugene?’ she says. ‘Where’s he gone?’ ‘Eugene isn’t here, Evelyn. You know that.’ ‘Oh.’

I press her hands round her knitting needles. Her skin is cool and papery—it doesn’t quite feel like flesh. She starts on her knitting again.

‘Where’s Eugene?’ she says again, after a while. ‘I want to kiss him goodnight.
Somebody’s
got to.’ She gives me a rather flinty look.

‘Evelyn. Eugene’s away fighting. He’s being very brave,’ I say. ‘Was the letter from him? Did you burn his letter?’ she says. ‘No, of course not. Why on earth would I do that?’ ‘He doesn’t write to us,’ she says.

‘No, he can’t. You know that. I’m sure he wants to, but he can’t. The letters can’t get through. Not with the Germans here. There’s a war on, Evelyn, remember.’

‘A war. They say there’s a war. They always say there’s a war on,’ she says. ‘But I don’t see any fighting round here. Rather the reverse in fact.’

The smell of burnt paper is faint, just the slightest trace on the air—yet it seems to hang around for a very long time.

Later, I walk up to Angie’s. There’s a raw, wet wind, the last tattered leaves being whipped from the trees in the lanes. The
letter is there in my mind; I can still see it so vividly—the crooked letters, screaming out, full of accusation and rage. I think,
Am I that ugly thing?
Everyone I pass in the lane, I think, Was it them? Did they send it? The island feels hostile to me—as though it has spewed me out and pushed me away. As though I am not wanted here.

O
ne night, when we are in bed, I touch the scar on his face. It feels very soft beneath my finger, like a small child’s skin. ‘So how did this happen?’ I ask him.

For a moment he doesn’t speak. As though his mind is full of words, and he can’t choose the right ones. His eyes are a dense grey, like the smokes of autumn gardens.

‘This was my stepfather,’ he says.

I’m startled. I wasn’t expecting this. I thought the scar must be from some war injury, from the Great War. ‘Your stepfather?’

‘He hit me, and I fell on the stove,’ he tells me.

‘You haven’t told me about your stepfather,’ I say.

I think how he keeps himself hidden: how he has taken a long time to tell me this part of his story. Our revelations have been unequal: he knows so much more about my childhood than I know about his.

‘My own father died when I was six, and my mother married again. My stepfather was a difficult man. He was a pastor. Everyone admired him, but at home he was cruel,’ he says.

I try to imagine his stepfather—cool and stern and righteous.

‘How terrible for you.’ My voice sounds paltry, thin—as though my words are too easy, not weighty enough.

‘You learn to keep quiet,’ he tells me. ‘You learn to keep out of the way—to do what you are told to do …’

‘Of course you would,’ I say gently. Not wanting to intrude on his thought—wanting him to go on talking.

‘I have thought about this very much,’ he tells me. ‘When you are small, you think,
My stepfather is right, surely? Maybe I am a bad child. If he says it is so, it must be true.
When this man is so powerful, and you are dependent on him, you have to believe he is right.’

He takes a long drag on his cigarette. I have my head on his chest. I hear how his heart speeds up as he talks, like somebody running away; though his voice is slow and full of thought.

‘But then, as I grew older, I knew that wasn’t so. I came to understand that my stepfather was a cruel man.’

‘He sounds very cruel,’ I say.

He shifts a little, moves a few inches away from me in the bed—as though my closeness distracts him from the thing he needs to say. I lie on my side, watching him.

‘There was a night when he started to hit my brother. Before that night, it had always been me that he hit. It was for the smallest thing, some water spilt on the floor. He blamed my brother, and beat him. I should have defended my brother, knocked my stepfather down. I was big enough then, I was eleven, I was big for my age, I could have fought him. But I didn’t.’

I hear the catch in his voice. I can feel how raw this still is—the shame still vivid for him, still present.

‘He started to beat my brother, and I did nothing. I just remember hiding under the stairs. Hearing the blows. I covered my ears with my hands, but I still heard the sound of the beating. A blow in the silence of a house is a very loud thing.’

His voice is even, measured; but I sense the distress that lies under his words.

‘You see—I am not such a good man, Vivienne,’ he says.

I shake my head.

‘It was such a long time ago,’ I tell him. ‘And you were only a child. Eleven is still very little. How could you possibly have stopped him?’

‘I know what I was thinking then.’ His voice is very quiet. When he turns towards me, I can feel his words on my skin, but I can only just hear him. ‘I can remember it now.
While he hits him, he won’t hit me …
That is what I thought,’ he says.

‘You were only a boy. What choice did you have?’ I say again.