Authors: Margaret Leroy
A
t night, when the girls are in bed, I sit at my kitchen table. I go through it all again and again, and the questions slice through me like blades. Was it Gunther who betrayed us? Could he have done such a thing, in spite of all that has passed between us—all the loving, the tenderness, all that we have shared? Is he capable of such treachery?
As I think these things, I draw in breath as though I’m drowning.
At ten o’clock, I hear the familiar soft knock at my door.
He comes in and I shut the door behind him. We stand looking at one another. Usually we will kiss, and then I will take him up to my room. But he doesn’t move. Perhaps he immediately reads something in my face, something that troubles him. He doesn’t bend down to touch me or kiss me, just stands there. He looks different, in a way that I can’t quite define or express.
‘You seem so tired,’ I say, noticing this.
‘Yes. I am tired.’
He rubs a hand over his face. His hand moves jerkily—as though his body isn’t fluent any more.
He clears his throat, as if to say something.
‘Vivienne …’
He swallows, as though this thing is too hard for him to say.
I know I have to be the one to say it.
‘Something happened here today, in my orchard,’ I tell him. ‘Yes,’ he says.
But his tone is somehow dismissive. An icy sliver of doubt runs through me, hearing this.
‘A man was killed,’ I say. ‘Shot. One of the slave-workers.’ ‘Yes, I heard,’ he says. Nothing more.
His awkwardness, his reticence, tell me all I need to know. That he knew about Kirill, that he realised. How could he not have known—hearing the coughing, seeing me with the breakfast tray, knowing I wasn’t telling the truth when I said that Evelyn was ill? That he realised, and just did his job. That it was a difficult choice, but his duty was to his country. Bad things happen in wartime. You have to be careful, you don’t want to step out of line. Killing is easy—to start with, maybe not so easy. But after a while, it is very easy to kill.
And in that moment I decide.
‘Gunther,’ I say, in a shred of a voice. ‘I need to tell you something.’
He nods, just a slight, curt movement of his head. His face is serious, resigned. As though he has given up somehow. As though something has died in him. It’s almost as if he expected this—it is all pre-ordained, he knows it and expects it, he just has to make his way through it.
‘Gunther. I don’t think I can do this any more. I’m so sorry …’
He says nothing. His silence is terrible.
‘It’s too difficult. Too confusing,’ I say. There’s a pain in my throat, as though saying this has hurt me.
I’m willing him to read my mind, to put everything back as it was. I want him to know why I am saying these things. I want him to explain that it was nothing to do with him: that what happened to Kirill wasn’t his fault—that he wasn’t the one who betrayed us. But I can’t ask directly: because to ask him if he knew and told would be to reveal too much—to reveal that I harboured Kirill here. The fact that could put me and my children in danger—the fact that Kirill gave his life to conceal.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say again, helplessly.
With him standing so close, I feel the two things at once— the need to push him away from me; and the yearning for his touch, so familiar, so sweet. He was my refuge from all the fear and horror of these times—the place where I hid, the place where the war didn’t come. But now the war is here between us: Kirill’s terrible death is here between us.
‘If that is what you want … he says.
His voice is clear, but sounds as though it comes from far away, like a voice heard over water. He shrugs slightly. His eyes are blank. As though he has withdrawn from me already. I can’t bear the coldness, the distance, in his face.
I nearly say,
No, it’s not what I want. It’s what has to happen, but of course it’s not what I want.
But I don’t say anything.
I reach out, needing to touch his arm, to soften the harshness of this: and he steps away, as though he can’t bear my closeness.
I want him to protest. I want raised voices—for our parting to be messy, full of overt pain: for accusations, a sound of things
tearing apart. Not just withdrawal and restraint. It seems all wrong that it ends like this—with this silence, this absence.
He bows briefly, with that old-fashioned courtesy he has, and turns from me.
But as he goes, he stumbles and stubs his foot on the sill of the door. He curses under his breath—a quick, hushed, furious torrent of curses in his own language. His hands are balled into fists; I see how the veins stand out like knotted string on the backs of his hands. Then he goes to the door and closes it quite quietly behind him.
Even as I hear the click of the door, I feel the loss surge through me.
I sit at my kitchen table. I tell myself that this pain will lessen, diminish. That this is the very worst moment. That one day it won’t hurt so much. But I can’t imagine how that could ever happen.
O
n Monday evening, Blanche comes home with some peaches, a treat from Mrs Sebire. I remember the first time she did this, in the early days of the Occupation, when she was just beginning her job at the shop. I was a different person then.
She puts the fruit down on the kitchen table. ‘Why are there flowers in the orchard?’ she asks me, rather accusingly.
I turn to her. She was sure to notice them some time, but, stupidly, I haven’t worked out what to say.
‘Mum, haven’t you seen them? Somebody’s put some flowers under a tree. I just noticed.’
Her quizzical stare, blue as summer, is on me. ‘And there are black spots all over the tree trunk,’ she says. ‘How long has all that been there?’ ‘I put the flowers there,’ I say. She waits for more. ‘Why?’ she asks, when I say nothing.
‘Something sad happened,’ I say. ‘Yesterday, when you were at church. One of the slave-workers was shot there.’
‘What?’
she says. ‘But that’s awful. Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘I thought—the less you knew about it the better,’ I say.
Her eyes are bright and curious. She’s feeling both the sadness and the drama of this.
‘Mum—this wasn’t all something to do with Millie’s ghost, was it?’ she says. ‘That ghost she used to talk about last summer?’
‘Blanche—I don’t want to tell you more than that. Trust me. It’s safer that way.’
‘That means yes,’ she says. ‘All right, Mum, don’t worry. But I did start to wonder about Millie’s ghost—whether he was one of the men from one of those horrible camps.’
‘Blanche—we have to keep this to ourselves. I mean it.’
She gives me a slight complicit smile.
‘I’ll forget you ever told me,’ she says. ‘I won’t say a word to anyone.’
She turns from me, unbuttons her cardigan, flings it down on a chair. She’s too casual, too unconcerned. ‘It’s important, Blanche.’ ‘It’s all right, Mum. I understand.’
I’m still worried I’m not getting through, that she doesn’t understand how secret we have to be, how careful. Perhaps when I say what happened to Johnnie, she will see.
‘There’s something else you need to know,’ I tell her. ‘Johnnie’s been arrested.’
She whirls round to face me.
‘Johnnie?’
Her voice is hoarse. Her face crumples. Her reaction startles me: I didn’t expect that this news would upset her so much. I was careless: I wish I’d found a way to break it to her more gently.
I put my arms around her. I can feel her agitation, everything inside her spinning round like a top.
‘He’s in prison in St Peter Port,’ I tell her. ‘People think it’ll be all right—he’ll probably just be sent to prison in France.’
‘Was it one of his stupid, stupid schemes?’ she says.
‘They found Brian’s gun in his room,’ I tell her.
‘Johnnie’s such an idiot.’ Her voice blazes with anger. ‘How could he be so stupid? Why doesn’t he realise that he matters to people?’ she says.
‘Blanche—I didn’t know you saw him …’
‘Well, I don’t. Not really … Well, just sometimes,’ she says. ‘Why did he let that happen? Why didn’t he see?’
Later I hear her crying in her room. She doesn’t often cry. I knock and go straight in. She’s sprawled out on the bed, as though she were flung from a height. Her face is distorted with weeping, a soaked handkerchief balled in her fist. I sit beside her, put my hand on her arm.
‘Blanche, he’ll be all right. I really think he will. It’s happened to other Guernsey people. They’ve come safe home again … And you know how upbeat Johnnie is—how nothing gets him down …’
She sits up. I put my arms around her and she clings to me for a moment. Her face is damp, her eyelashes clumped together. Then she pulls away and scrubs at her face with the handkerchief.
‘Sorry to be so pathetic,’ she says.
‘Sweetheart. You don’t have to say sorry for being sad,’ I tell her.
She blows her nose.
‘Bother. I bet I’ve gone all red,’ she says.
I push back a strand of hair that has fallen over her face. It’s wet with her tears, like drowned hair.
‘The thing is, Mum,’ she says then. ‘It’s just that sometimes somebody goes. And you realise just how much you’re going to miss them. That you won’t know quite how to keep going when the person isn’t there … Mum, what is it?’ She stares at me, eyes widening, alarmed. ‘Don’t do that.
Please.’
Her voice shrill. ‘You’re my mum. You mustn’t cry. I hate it when you do that.’
T
he days shorten. The land is mellow and fruitful, the hedgebanks heavy and rich with rosehips, blackberries, elderberries. The Brent geese fly in from Siberia and graze in the fields near the shore: you can hear their strange creaking cries in the night. The apples in my orchard swell. There are figs on the fig tree on my terrace, and mulberries on my mulberry tree that darken to a luscious red so deep that it is almost black. The mulberries are easy to crush and we eat them straight from the tree, so Millie’s lips have a permanent stain of vivid, wine-dark juice. The island is full of ripeness, of completion.
I still see him around, as summer sifts down into autumn. I’ll glimpse him from my bedroom window, walking up the path between the borders at Les Vinaires; or when I’m tending the chickens I might see him talking with Max or Hans in the garden. A couple of times I pass him in the lane. My heart pounds. I don’t know what will happen. But it’s easy—too easy. He nods politely, and then avoids my gaze—it’s as though we are almost strangers, people who just know each other by sight, people who happen to live in next-door houses. As though we
never loved one another at all. Once I glimpse him through the window in the darkening evening, sitting at the table, writing a letter by candlelight—for we have no electricity in the evenings now. He’s deep in thought, his sleeves rolled up. I wonder what he is thinking: I feel something is withdrawn in him, that he is not entirely present. I wonder if in his mind he has retreated to Bavaria, to the stillness of that mountain landscape he loves, where he would paint and have a whole day of quiet: where he could shape his picture precisely as he wanted it, everything flowing like water, the scene forming under his hand.
Evelyn worries me more than ever. She spends so much of her day asleep now, or in the hinterland between wakefulness and dream, and sometimes I wonder what she sees in her sleep—if the past is more real, more vivid to her than the present; if she sees all the people and scenes of her past, all crowding into the house. Then at night-time sleep will elude her, and I’ll find her wandering in the house or garden in her night clothes, and I’ll take her hand and guide her back to her bed.
One day when I’m cleaning the living room, she suddenly looks up at me. Her face is thoughtful and alert, as though she sees me clear.
‘So, Vivienne, my dear,’ she says. As though something has just occurred to her. Almost as though she’s continuing a conversation we’ve had. ‘Eugene’s away at war, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’ve been on your own all this time?’ There’s tenderness in her voice. Her eyes on me are sweet and blue as a child’s. I nod.
I suddenly remember what she was like when she was younger, before old age began to dull and fracture her mind, to steal so much away from her. How she was brisk, sometimes acerbic, but her forthrightness always tempered with a practical down-to-earth kindliness.
I kneel beside her chair.
‘It must be lonely,’ she says. ‘So lonely for you without him. What a struggle for you. Bringing up Blanche and little Millie and looking after me … And in wartime too … And, my dear, I know I’m not always the easiest person in the world …’
I try to speak, but my throat is tight with tears.
‘I’m so sorry, my dear. That you’ve been so lonely like this … And maybe even when Eugene was here … Well, I saw it sometimes, Vivienne. That he wasn’t always as good to you as he could have been,’ she says.
I’m amazed. I suddenly wonder if she knew about Monica Charles.
She puts her hand on mine, and her touch is gentle, a mother’s touch.
‘Maybe I haven’t always understood. I’m so sorry, Vivienne … So sorry for everything …’
And then there’s a blurred look in her eyes again, their clarity clouding over like an end-of-summer sky, and she drifts off to some other place.
I wrap her blanket around her, trying to swallow down my tears, so they don’t fall on her.
Johnnie, as Piers predicted, is sent to prison in France for a year.
I visit Gwen often. Her kitchen is cleaner than ever, everything polished, scrubbed, scoured. She’s always so busy and
driven—as though with all her striving she could make everything turn out well.
‘He’s been lucky—I know he’s been lucky,’ she says.
She rubs her hand over her face. She has a new, dramatic streak of white in her hair.
‘Well, yes—in a way,’ I tell her.
On the table between us, there’s a vase of chrysanthemums, in those dusty colours they have, that always look a little forlorn. She moves her hands on the table top, tracing random pathways through the petals that have fallen there. She makes me think of Johnnie, the way she can’t keep still. It’s as if she has taken his restlessness into herself.
‘I really think that, Viv. We’ve all been lucky,’ she says. ‘People have been shot for less, I know that. But, my God, I miss him. It’s like losing part of myself. The best part …’
I put my hand on her arm.
‘It’s less than a year to go now,’ I say. ‘I know it seems like for ever, but it isn’t really.’ She nods.
‘That’s what I keep telling myself. The thing is—I can talk to Johnnie like nobody else,’ she says. ‘Ernie’s my rock. He’s such a good man. Hard-working. But you know what men can be like—he doesn’t really
talk
to me. But Johnnie would talk, we would talk for hours.I want him back,’ she says.
It’s dark in the evenings now, and Millie and Simon can’t play outside any more. After school, they play in Millie’s bedroom. Millie adamantly refuses to play in the attic. She has a fixed idea that she’ll get Simon into trouble with the Germans if they go there—and nothing I say can reassure her.
We pick the apples in my orchard. The girls help me, a little wary, watching out for wasps. We sort through the apples meticulously, removing all the blemished ones that won’t keep: these I will bake in the oven with some of Gwen’s clover honey. I lay out the rest of the apples on cardboard trays in the shed, where it’s cool and they will keep well. Each one is precious.
When the fruit have all been picked, Harry Tostevin comes with his saw to fell my apple trees. We’ll need this wood for fuel, to see us through the winter months. Everywhere, people are doing the same, cutting down the trees that made our island so beautiful. I watch as Harry fells the first tree: there’s a tearing sound as its branches catch on the other trees as it topples, then a deep dull thud as it hits the ground, and its many soft brown leaves shiver on for a long time after its fall. After that I can’t bear to watch any more, as he cuts down the tree under which I first talked to Gunther—the tree where Kirill died, that was splashed with drops of his blood. But I can’t escape the sound of it. I think of all the stories of Guernsey ghosts I’ve read to Millie: I wonder what spirits will haunt our island in generations to come. Will Kirill haunt my orchard, restless and troubled in this faraway place, forever trying to find a way back to the homeland he loved?
Afterwards, the land where my orchard grew is ugly—scarred with stumps, where once there was so much blossom and fruit. Harry chops the wood into logs and we store them in my garden shed. At least we have fuel for the winter now.
You do what you have to do.
I can’t hear the click of Evelyn’s needles. I look in on her, but she isn’t asleep. She’s unravelling her knitting. She slides
the needles out of the stitches and pulls on the strand of wool. She does this as carefully, as assiduously, as when she is making something.
I go to her. I put my hand gently on hers. She moves her hand away from mine. She goes on pulling at the wool, undoing her work. It’s so horribly easy to do: the wool is still crimped where the stitches were, but it’s rapidly losing its shape, like something melting.
‘You don’t want to do that, Evelyn. After putting in all that work,’ I say.
‘But I have to, you see, my dear. I have to …’
I can’t bear to see her do this. I’d like to take the knitting from her, to save what she has made. But I can’t remove it from her by force.
She pulls and pulls at the wool. At last there’s just a messy heap of crinkled wool in her lap.
She gives a little sigh, as though something has been completed.
‘There,’ she says. ‘It’s all done now.’
Her voice is calm, her movements measured; there’s none of that agitation that so often hangs about her.
I don’t know what to do now, whether to take the wool from her. But she holds the heap of it out to me. There’s a surprising, unfamiliar peacefulness in her face.
‘There you are then, Vivienne,’ she says.
In the daytime I keep busy, I try not to think. I make sausages from haricot beans and a cake with grated carrot. I look after my chickens and tend my vegetable patch: I pick onions and leeks, and the first Brussels sprouts of the year. I clean the house and
darn our clothes, and take up the hems of some of Blanche’s old frocks for Millie—keeping everything going. And all the time I long for him—that longing that is just a fact of the body, like a sickness.
I sleep a lot, even during the day. I have such a hunger for sleep. When Millie is at school, and Evelyn is sitting quietly, and for a while nobody needs me, I creep up to my bedroom. I kick off my shoes and lie down under the covers. My head just touches the pillow and I immediately fall asleep, the drowsiness like a drug in me. I’ve heard that sadness can take you like that.
I make an oil lamp from an old Brasso can. Every evening, by the light of the lamp, I read a story to Millie from Angie’s book of Guernsey tales. I read about healing wells and ghostly funeral processions. I read about hearth fairies, and the duty we have to tell family news to the bees. I read how cobwebs can staunch bleeding, and how the seagull is viewed with mingled awe and suspicion, for in its wide-ranging flight it perceives many mysteries that are hidden from men; and how a cloud of midges over water signifies rain.
And I read the story I first read when I was falling in love with Gunther, the story about the man who took the boat to Sark, and shot at the duck who was really a girl. How she was wounded.