Authors: Margaret Leroy
T
he evening after Gunther leaves, I decide I will go blackberrying. Celeste is seeing Tomas her boyfriend, so Blanche is staying home; and I leave her to keep an eye on things, and cycle up to the clifftop, where there are great stands of blackberry bushes.
I leave my bicycle in a gateway and walk along the lane. The hedges are low here: beyond them, the fields slope down to the cliff, where the land drops sharply to Les Tielles, and there’s a wide view of the sea, which today is silky with evening and filled with daffodil light. There’s a kestrel high above me, poised and vigilant, sooty black against the sky dazzle, hovering on the up-current where the cooler air sweeps off the sea. The wind has died, the land seems vast and empty: I feel as though I am the only person in the world. A deep peacefulness settles on my shoulders like a shawl.
The hedges are rich with berries, many now dark and glossily ripe. I start to pick; the tips of my fingers are coloured with the berries’ vivid indigos. I suck the tart taste from my skin. It’s so quiet I can hear my shoes creak as I move, and the rustle of the bramble leaves is loud against my hand, like something tearing.
Soon, I have enough ripe berries to make a couple of pies, and I feel that brief soaring sense of triumph that always seems to come when I find food for my family.
At last I turn to go home, a little reluctant to leave the peace of this place, pausing for a moment to look out again over the sea. The sun is setting amid thick cotton-wool streaks of cloud, which soak up the radiance like a stain. All the yellow is gone from the water now; the sea heaves and stirs like some grey scaly beast that is restless and moves in its sleep. The kestrel still hovers above me; then folds its wings and plummets like a dropped stone.
A sudden noise startles me—a German voice, abrupt, steely, shouting an order. I’m still, my heart thuds in my chest: I know what this means—a gang of slave-workers coming back from their work. The thing I saw before rushes through me—that terrible casual savagery that I have tried so hard to put from my mind. I have no time to hide away. I press myself into the hedge.
The work-gang comes into view around the bend in the lane. They must have been building Hitler’s ring of concrete at the clifftop. They are guarded by two OT workers, who have swastika armbands and guns.
I stare at the slave-workers. The world tilts around me.
The prisoners must have been mixing cement—they are covered with it, the greyish powder all over their hair, their skin, their eyelashes, so their faces are blank and whitened, all their colour taken away. Their clothes are rags, and they’ve covered themselves in the canvas sacks that once held the cement, the canvas tied roughly around their waists with scraps of wire or string, and they have no shoes, and some of them have tied
more sacking around their feet. Their heads are bowed from exhaustion, and their bones are sharp through their skin.
In the dimming light they are pale as ghosts, and their feet are utterly silent.
M
illie dreams she has swallowed a fishbone, and wakes with a very sore throat. I tell her she’ll have to stay home.
‘Can I still play with Simon?’ she says. ‘When he comes home from school?’
‘No. Of course not,’ I tell her briskly. ‘Of course you can’t play out if you haven’t gone to school.’
Her nose is blocked, and I put some Vick’s embrocation in a bowl of steaming water, and get her to breathe in the vapours, with her eyes tight shut and a towel draped over her head. Afterwards she can breathe more easily. I fetch her eiderdown, and make her a bed on the sofa, with her Buckingham Palace jigsaw on a tray. It’s the only time I have ever been glad that a child of mine is ill—it makes everything simpler.
About an hour before curfew, when Evelyn is in her bedroom and Blanche is still at Celeste’s, I tell Millie I’ll be gone for a while. A blackbird is singing his heart out on the gable of Le Colombier, as I cross the lane and walk through my orchard and into the fields. I skirt the edge of the Blancs Bois, pass on through the cool air of evening to Peter Mahy’s barn. My heart
pounds. I’m alert to every whisper and lisp of the leaves, to every murmur of the countryside around me, to the scrabble of each hidden creature in the seething grass: as if I were a stranger here.
Shadow dense as black river-water laps at the foot of the barn. As I draw nearer, I see that the door is open. I approach softly, look in.
At first I can’t make anything out: there’s only shadow inside. Perhaps I have been mistaken. Perhaps I jumped to the wrong conclusion. Relief swims through me. I’m about to turn and go back—when I see that the deeper darkness in the corner is a man. He has his side to me, he doesn’t see me; I think he is dulled, unaware—from exhaustion, from starvation, from seeing too much. He sits, leaning forward, his bent hunched shadow falling over the floor. Like the men I saw on the clifftop, he is wearing a canvas sack, with wire around his waist and ragged holes torn for his arms. His shoes too are made from sacking. I can’t tell what colour his hair is, or what age he might be. All the things that make him himself are erased, by dust and dirt and hunger: his face is almost the face of a skull, the bones so fierce through his skin. I understand why the children believed him to be a visitant, someone from another world: it’s the presaging of death in his face. He has a crust of bread in his hand. He tears at it with his teeth, desperate, ravenous.
The world around me is hollow, stilled. All I can hear is the sound that his teeth make ripping the bread, and the soft dull sound of my heart, pounding.
There’s a little voice in my head—soft, persuasive, concerned.
Don’t look. Keep safe. Go away. Go back to Le Colombier and pretend this never happened. Pretend you didn’t see him …
And
there’s something in me that’s desperate to obey the soft little voice—and not only because of the danger. To let myself look is to begin to put myself in his place—hungry, wretched, so abused—and I can’t bear that. But my daughter has come and looked at him: Millie, who is six now, and not afraid of the dark. Millie has come and looked and not turned away.
When I get back, she is still under her eiderdown on the sofa, doing her jigsaw. The bracing smell of menthol and eucalyptus hangs in the room, and makes my eyes sting.
I kneel on the floor beside her.
‘Millie. I saw your ghost. In Mr Mahy’s barn.’
She goes quite still, her face set as a mask, her hand poised over the jigsaw. Between her finger and thumb she holds a little piece of sky.
‘I know you took the food,’ I say.
She puts the jigsaw piece down on the tray, delicately, with a small clear click, like the breaking of a tiny bone.
‘He was hungry.’ Defiantly. ‘We had food and he didn’t. That isn’t fair,’ she says.
‘No, it isn’t,’ I say.
She has a slight fever: a strand of hair sticks to her red damp face. She pushes at the hair, as though she is angry with it.
‘You mustn’t be cross with me, Mummy.’
‘I’m not cross, sweetheart. I’m not cross with you.’
‘He was hungry, and we fed him,’ she says. Her hands are balled into fists. She’s concentrating so hard, trying to explain to me.
‘Yes. I know why you did it …’
‘He came from Hell. That’s where he lives. He lives in Hell. He told us.’ ‘Millie …’
‘And it isn’t like the Rector said. The Rector is wrong when he says that Hell isn’t a place. My ghost says that Hell is a real place. I know you don’t believe me …’
‘I do believe you,’ I say.
Her eyes widen with surprise.
I reach out, put my arms around her. She’s rigid, holding back from me—not sure what to make of me, still not sure what I think.
‘But I don’t want you to do it any more, sweetheart,’ I say. ‘It’s far too dangerous for you.’
‘No, you’re wrong.’ Protesting. ‘You’re saying that just because you don’t know him. The ghost is kind. The ghost wouldn’t hurt us,’ she says.
‘No, I’m sure he wouldn’t.’
‘I only said those things to frighten Blanche,’ she says. ‘When I said he was scary. I was fibbing when I said that. I did it because she was being a pain. I wanted to give her a fright.’
‘That isn’t what I mean. I know he wouldn’t hurt you. But if the Germans found out, they would be very angry,’ I say.
‘Would they put us in prison?’
‘Yes. In prison or … I remember what Vera said at the school gate—about the woman on Jersey, who took a slave-worker into her home. How she was shot. I push the thought away. ‘The thing is—they mustn’t find out. Not ever.’
‘But somebody’s got to feed him,’ she says. ‘If me and Simon don’t do it, who will? He’ll
starve!
‘It should be grownups who do these things, Millie,’ I tell her. ‘It isn’t safe for children. I want you to tell Simon that you can’t go to the barn any more. Will you do that?’
She’s frowning. She doesn’t say anything.
‘He won’t starve, Millie. Trust me.’
She looks at me doubtfully.
‘I need you to promise,’ I tell her.
‘All right,’ she says. Reluctantly.
‘And, sweetheart, something else. This has to be a secret. We won’t tell anyone. Not even Grandma or Blanche …’
This pleases her. I see her quicksilver smile.
‘Yes. It’s our secret,’ she says. ‘It’s a really big secret, isn’t it?’
And I think, with a little lurch of my heart:
Yes, it’s a really big secret.
I wake abruptly in the night. It’s surprising to find myself alone: I’ve grown so used to sleeping with Gunther wrapped around me. The bed feels too big and empty without him. The silence in the house around me is deep, complete, but my heart is racing as though some sudden sound disturbed me. I don’t know what can have woken me.
I get up, go to the window, look out across my dark yard, resting my forehead against the cool glass. There’s a little tentative moonlight: a gusty wind is pushing rags of cloud across the moon. The hollyhocks in the garden of Les Vinaires look spectral, unreal, in the moonlight—as white and luminous as ice. And immediately the thought is there in my head—as though this realisation came to me in my dream, as though this is what woke me.
I told Gunther. I told him about Millie’s ghost …
I try to remember how he reacted when I told him. He was reassuring.
I think: he talked about his own childhood. But maybe he was just humouring me. Maybe he guessed who Millie’s ghost really was: maybe he knew all this time … The thought appals me. It doesn’t change my resolve, but it fills me with fear. What will happen to her, to us?
The rest of the night I don’t sleep.
I
make a thick soup with some of the potatoes Johnnie brought, the day I slaughtered the chicken. I add plenty of milk to the soup. I taste a spoonful. It’s creamy, warming—I hope it will be easy to digest.
All is as it should be: Blanche at Celeste’s house, Evelyn safe in her room. Millie is on the sofa, with her cut-out dolls on the tray; she likes to dress them up in cardboard clothes that fix to them with little tabs. When I tell her that I’m going out, she gives me a quick knowing smile.
It’s a beautiful evening, with low smudged clouds and a golden light on the land. I walk quickly through the fields, my heart juddering.
He is there, just as yesterday, hunched on the floor of the barn, rocking slightly as he sits there. I slip in through the open door. I think he will notice my shadow falling across the ground in front of him: but he doesn’t turn, doesn’t see me.
I stand there for a long moment. My heart is beating so hard it shakes the fabric of my blouse. I tell myself I could go, I could still turn and leave. Everything flashes before me, spooling out in my mind—vivid, precise, incandescent with disaster. The
Germans will see us, I will be shot, my children will be left motherless—the worst thing, the thing I had always vowed must never happen to them.
My throat is narrow as a needle’s eye.
‘Excuse me,’ I say.
My voice sounds odd, as though it isn’t my voice. I think, What an utterly stupid thing to say. Knowing he won’t understand me.
He turns, slowly. I don’t think he heard me coming: perhaps my voice has startled him. I’m about to say,
Don’t be frightened,
but I see he isn’t afraid; perhaps he has left all everyday fears behind him. His eyes are black as sloe-berries and fringed with whitened lashes. His gaze, without curiosity, rests on my face.
‘I am Millie’s mother. Millie, the little girl …’
I put out my hand to show how small she is. I mime reaching out to take the hand of a child.
I feel hugely awkward, as though my body is fixed together wrongly: amid all the danger, the risk, feeling above all a kind of social embarrassment, that I don’t know how to do this—how to talk to someone who doesn’t speak the same language as me.
He looks at me, his eyes too dark for the chalky pallor of his face. I think I see a gleam of understanding in his gaze.
‘I have food,’ I say.
He watches me. He doesn’t move.
I trace out a bowl in the air with my hand, mime spooning food into my mouth. ‘Come with me,’ I say. I beckon.
‘The children are good children. The children are my friends,’ he says, in perfect, lightly accented English.
I hear my quick in-breath. ‘You can speak English?’
‘Yes. I speak English. The children and I can talk together,’ he says.
His voice is too high for a man. I remember what Angie told me, about people who are starving—how their voices have a sound like the voices of birds.
‘How did you learn?’ I ask him.
‘A man in my village taught me English,’ he says. And also Polish. He worked on a farm in my village, but he had worked at a university once. He taught me many things …’
‘Oh,’ I say.
I can’t imagine where he comes from; or why in his country such a teacher might have to work on a farm. I know nothing. I feel a jolt of surprise—that this man, with his rags, his wretchedness, is better schooled than me. Nothing is as I’d thought it was.
‘My name is Vivienne,’ I say then. ‘I am Kirill,’ he says.
He points to his chest, using his second finger, not his index finger. I see that part of his index finger is missing, that the finger ends in an ugly, purpled stub of flesh.
‘We will go to my house, Kirill,’ I tell him.
‘Yes. Thank you.’
I lead him through the fields, keeping close to the hedge. He walks silently behind me. He shuffles; he scarcely has the strength to lift his feet from the ground. He has a musty smell, not quite human, like something old, neglected. I don’t feel scared, just unreal—as though I am watching myself from a great height.
We reach the lane. I look around, wary, but everywhere is quiet. I take him through my back gate, the little wicket gate in the hedgebank that leads into my garden, and through the back door of my house, the door I rarely use, that cannot be seen from Les Vinaires. I lead him through to the kitchen.
His eyes widen. I see that to find himself here in this room is astonishing to him: that for him my simple kitchen is a place of enchantment, a fairytale castle, removed, encircled by thorns.
I pull out a chair and seat him at the table. He is a big man—or would have been big, before the flesh fell off him. He moves cautiously, as a big man will move in a small enclosed space, as though afraid of breaking something.
The room is full of the scent of the soup that is simmering on the stove. I ladle some into a bowl, put it in front of him. ‘This is for you,’ I tell him.
He picks up the spoon, and bends low over the bowl. I see that his hands have a tremor. He eats, absolutely intent. I let him eat. I don’t talk.
As he eats, I’m startled by a sensation I didn’t expect. A warm elation floods me. That his need is so great and I can fulfil that need: that I can feed him. It’s like the way you can feel when a child is sick and needing you completely, this perfect, simple imperative—all conflict wiped away, your purpose clear as ink on white paper.
Millie has heard us. She slips into the room with us. She has a slight pleased smile. He looks up from the soup.
‘Millie,’ he says, and a little light comes in his face. She sits beside him, folds her hands fastidiously in front of her. She’s on her best behaviour for him.
I refill the bowl. He eats that too. He sits back with a sigh.
‘Thank you. Thank you,’ he says.
I find a clean towel for him.
‘You can wash your face if you want,’ I say.
He turns on the tap, lets the water splash on his hands. The water drops glitter, holding the gilded evening light that falls all over the room. He watches the swollen radiant droplets for a moment, as though this is a miracle unfolding between his hands, then he lowers his head and plunges under the tap. As the water sluices the dirt from his face, he becomes himself again, emerging from his cocoon of grime, so we can see who he is. He’s young, not much older than Blanche—so young, he could be my son. His youthfulness catches at my heart. His hair and beard and eyebrows are dark, and his skin is brown and weather-beaten under the dust and the dirt. You can see all the scars and cuts on his skin that were hidden by the cement dust.
When he has washed, he sits at my table again. I take out two cigarettes, light them, pass one to him. He takes a deep, grateful drag, the glowing tip reflecting redly in the dark of his eyes. The illusory brightness makes him seem more vividly alive, more present.
‘Kirill. How do you get out of the camp?’ I ask him.
‘There is a hole in the wire,’ he says. ‘There are guards who will not notice if we leave the camp at night. They look in the other direction. If we are there for the morning roll-call, some of them turn a blind eye. There is little food in the camp. They give us only water with a bit of turnip in it.’
‘You can’t possibly live on that,’ I say.
‘I think they let us go out so they don’t have to feed us,’ he
says. ‘We steal. There is no other way. Before the children fed me, I had to steal to survive.’ ‘Yes. Of course,’ I say.
‘And we know where the rubbish tips are. We eat off the rubbish tips.’
‘That’s terrible,’ I say.
‘No, it is good,’ he tells me. ‘I can say, the rubbish tips are life to us. It is the camp that is terrible. The work is hard, and we are beaten. Many people have died there. For those of us who still live, it is our hatred that keeps us alive.’
His clever, sloe-dark eyes on mine.
‘You can eat here for this week,’ I tell him. ‘But we will have to be careful. There are German soldiers living in the house next door. You must wait in the barn tomorrow and I’ll come and meet you there …’
It’s nearly time for curfew—I know I have to take him back.
‘Millie, Kirill is going now,’ I tell her. ‘You have to say goodbye.’
She waves to him, happily.
I take him out through the back door.
‘Thank you, Vivienne. You are very kind.’
Under the hedgebank the shadows are dark as wet walnuts. He crosses to my orchard, and vanishes in the sepia gloom on the other side of the lane, as silent as the night breeze.
‘He liked the soup, didn’t he?’ says Millie, when I get back.
‘Yes.’
Her face shines.
‘He
really, really
liked it,’ she says. ‘Can he always come to our house?’
‘He can come here for a few days,’ I tell her. ‘After that, I don’t know, sweetheart. I’ll have to work something out.’ ‘Yes. You’ll have to, Mummy.’
I notice she doesn’t talk about him as a ghost any more: that it didn’t surprise her to see him in the everydayness of our kitchen. Perhaps it’s just as Gunther said—that she lives at once in this world and a world of her own, moving easily between these worlds.
‘Millie—we have to be very secret,’ I say. ‘Nobody must know. Nobody. Can you do that—be very secret?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she says.
I wash the bowl he ate from. There’s a sifting of pale cement dust under the table, and dirt in the sink from when he washed his face and his hair. I clean the sink, and brush up all the cement dust very meticulously.
‘Vivienne.’
I jump. Dust from the dustpan spills like a gritty grey flour on the floor. It gets everywhere. Evelyn is there, in the doorway.
Thank God,
I think.
Thank God she didn’t come down before.
‘I need my Bible, Vivienne. I want to read my Bible. I can’t find my Bible, Vivienne.’
The towel Kirill used is lying on the draining board. He couldn’t wash off all the dirt, and the fabric holds smudges of grime, in a blurry photographer’s negative, tracing the lines of his face. I fold it up quickly.
‘Your Bible is on your bedside table,’ I say.
‘Is it, Vivienne?’
‘Yes. I saw it there.’
But she has a perplexed look, as though she still feels that something is lost or taken away. Her eyes fall on Millie.
‘You shouldn’t be up, young lady.’ This at least she is certain about. ‘It’s long past your bedtime.’
Millie darts a complicit look at me. I give her a slight warning frown. To my relief, she doesn’t try to explain.
‘I’m going to bed now, Grandma,’ she says, demurely.
‘Come back upstairs,’ I say to Evelyn.
But Evelyn stands there, unmoving.
‘You’ve got dirty hands, Vivienne.’
‘Yes. I’ve been sweeping up …’
This doesn’t satisfy her. Her puzzlement gathers between her eyes, in a faint, perplexed fleur-de-lys.
‘Vivienne. Somebody’s been here. Something smells different. I can smell it.’
‘Don’t worry, Evelyn, it’s nothing.’
‘Somebody’s been here. A stranger’s been here. Someone who doesn’t belong.’
‘No, Evelyn. Not a stranger.’
‘Is it one of your friends, then, Vivienne?’
‘Yes. Just one of my friends,’ I say. ‘It’s nothing to worry about.’
‘You and your friends. So many comings and goings.’ She shakes her head, disapproving. ‘Why can’t we have a bit of peace?’ she says.
‘These aren’t peaceful times we live in,’ I tell her, vaguely.
I take her up to her room, find her Bible for her. But she’s too tired to read now. She lies in her bed, and I tuck her up like a child. Her head is so small on her pillow, her scalp pink
and vulnerable through the frail white fuzz of her hair. Her eyes gleam in the light of her bedside lamp. She’s staring over my shoulder and I wonder what she sees.
I find myself wondering what it is like to be old, as old as Evelyn—to look back over your lifetime, to reflect on the choices you made. I think of the words of the Confession.
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done …
I wonder what causes you most regret, in the final years of your life: the undone things—or the things you did, that you ought not to have done.
I turn off her lamp, and leave her.