The September Garden (20 page)

A sudden thump from upstairs, and something rolling across the floor. Adele looked up from her pile of potatoes to the ceiling. Easing herself up from the kitchen chair, she winced. She only had a little while to go and her baby would be born. And then? What then for Estella and Edmund? She panted her way up two flights of stairs. She walked the long landing and grasped the handle of the spare room – the one that little Nell had stayed in when she had been their summer guest just three years before – and opened the door.

The children were already in their dressing gowns, their heads bent over their schoolbooks. Adele taught them to be ready for bed when she came to give them supper. It saved her time.

She glanced quickly at the windows; the shutters were closed, the curtains drawn. Not one chink of light would show to anyone standing below in the street. The lamp was
dim and, at her insistence, set away from the window by the bed. With a dull nagging fear she wondered how much the neighbours knew; how much they turned a blind eye.

Edmund looked up from his homework and beamed at her, his smile brightening his pale, narrow face. ‘I have learnt my nine times table today,’ he said cheerily. ‘Estella tested me. Will you test me again, Madame Ricard?’

‘Yes, all right. I will,’ Adele murmured, distracted, wondering, as she always did, how the children managed to exist, and still be
children
, shut away in this stifling ill-lit prison.

Estella already squinted, complained of headaches. She probably needed new glasses. Edmund often chatted about the outdoors, the harbour, the billowing green fields, the
bocage
beyond, as if he was reliving a recurring dream. And yet, they complied, obeyed Adele daily in the confines of their stuffy bedroom.

Estella, sitting at the desk, piped up, ‘Adele, will you tell us a bedtime story? The story of the horses again?’

She wanted to chastise her with
It’s Madame Ricard to you,
but hadn’t the heart to when she looked at the little girl’s open expectant face.

‘Yes, yes,’ she said. ‘But first, I must tell you something else. Something else very important.’

‘Is it
Maman
and
Papa
?’ Edmund leapt forward, bright and eager as always.

Adele ruffled his black hair with the tips of her fingers. ‘No, my dear. No, it’s not.’

‘But you still think they are with Madame Orlande?’ said Estella. ‘That’s what you said, didn’t you? They’ve all had to go away to the camps, to work, to help
La France
through the war. Isn’t that so?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ Adele said quickly.

‘I wanted to go too,’ Estella said.

‘Nine times one is nine. Two times nine is eighteen,’ quoted her brother.

As Adele took some clean sheets from the armoire, nausea rose in her throat. She stayed perfectly still while the boy’s confident little voice recited his tables. The sickening worry of the last few months had changed into something even more precarious.

She glanced around, unable to look them in the eye. ‘We are going to play another game, children. You wanted a story about the horses, Estella?’

The little girl nodded, her tired, pinched face pitifully eager.

‘Well, when it’s darker, when it’s quieter, we’re going to go down to the stable and climb up to the loft. You are going to sleep up there, above where Ullis and Tatillon used to live. And I’ll tell you the story there.’

Estella was wrapped in innocent rapture. ‘We’re going outside? In the night-time?’

Edmund, ever studious, asked politely, ‘Can I leave my lessons now, Madame Ricard? Did I do well in my times table test?’

‘Yes, Edmund,’ Adele said, not remembering a single sum. She bundled up some bedding inside the sheets and gathered some pillows with trembling hands. Her back was aching, the skin on her pregnant belly taut, her patience sharp. ‘I’m going to make up a nice bed for you in the attic, but you must be very quiet and very still. It’s all part of the game.’

What a risk she was taking, she thought, what an utter, dreadful risk. But she loved her husband and would do whatever he asked of her. Last night he told her about
the rumour: there were whispers about the children in the bistro. The Gestapo had a suspicion they were here. If she could get them out of the house, then Jean and the maquisards could spirit them away overnight and send them down the lines.

‘All the way to Spain?’ she asked him, her murmuring hoarse under the bedcovers.

‘All the way to Spain,’ he replied.

Adele had thought, then, of the irony of the sea just below their window, and freedom beyond, just within their grasp. But the dangers of going that way were far worse.

They would take them from the stable loft, Jean had revealed. They would come for them in a few nights’ time. When, he would not tell her.

‘And what about Monsieur?’

‘That is the hardest part,’ Jean said. ‘We have to rely on his humanity. We are at his mercy.’

Dusk was falling rapidly as Adele climbed the steep stone steps between the two stable doors each with its own sign nominating the long-dead horses who fed the children’s imaginations. She made up a bed in the dark on the dusty attic floor. The air smelt musty, of vegetables, of earth and old straw. It was a cold, grim place for
her
to be, let alone two small children. A keen draught blew through the missing tiles on the roof. She could barely stand under the low sloping ceiling. It would be for just a few nights, she told herself, shivering. They would be fine.

Hurrying back down the path, she realised she would risk breaking the curfew by returning to the sea wall cottage after dark. But she decided, if she was stopped, she could claim
she had been busy making the gendarme’s
déjeuner
. She, as his housekeeper, had certain privileges, just as he did.

‘Now, children,’ she said, opening the bedroom door. ‘This is very important. You must not say a word. You must follow me. And do exactly as I say. In fact, you must do exactly what any French person tells you from now on,’ thinking of when the maquisards would come for them. ‘Do you understand?’

‘Madame Ricard,’ Edmund stood in front of her, his face very solemn. ‘Will the soldiers find us?’

Estella wondered, ‘Are you going to stay with us in the stables after you’ve told us the story?’

‘No, my dear,’ she said. ‘I have to go home.’ She watched her face fall. ‘Are you both ready?’

‘Can I take my doll?’

‘Yes … yes …’ Tears stung at Adele’s eyes. ‘But that’s all.’

The little girl held on to the doll, tucking it beneath her chin.

‘I want to take my schoolbooks and pencils,’ announced Edmund.

‘All right!’ Adele shouted in frustration. ‘Put your hats and coats on, put your thick socks and boots on.’

She helped the little girl tie the rabbit fur collar she’d made her around her shoulders. She told Edmund to go first; to run along the path. Thank goodness, she thought, that his clothing was dark; he disappeared into the evening. She held Estella’s cold little hand and they hurried after him. By the time they reached the top of the attic steps, Adele was panting with a great stitch ripping at her side; Estella was in tears.

‘Don’t leave us here,’ the little girl begged. ‘Please don’t leave us.’

Adele did not look at her.

‘Here is some bread and cheese.’ She showed them a basket in the corner. ‘And some milk. There’s enough for a day …’

‘Aren’t you coming back? Stay, please stay.’

‘Get into bed and I will tell you the story,’ Adele said, sitting uneasily on the splintered, creaking floorboards over the empty stable below.

She listened to the profound silence of Montfleur beyond the stone walls; the subjugation, the tedious fear. She whispered her story to the children. She told them of the brave horses – one white, one chestnut – and how they went so eagerly to Flanders to help their masters win the Great War. They triumphed over the shells and the bullets, the mud, the wire and the wasteland. They helped take the wounded soldiers back to the hospital barracks; they helped take the great guns forward to strike at the enemy.

‘Our same enemy,’ Edmund whispered in the dark. ‘Even now.’

Adele looked over at him, but in the pitch-black she could not see his face. She could barely see her own hands in her lap.

‘That’s right, Edmund,’ she said. ‘And now, as you settle down to sleep, as you drift off – you too, Estella – if you listen very carefully, you can almost hear Ullis and Tatillon below, snorting and snoring in their straw. They’ll keep you safe,’ she said. ‘They will look after you tonight. Don’t be frightened. And soon, very soon—’

Adele stopped herself, for she realised she had no promises to make.

‘Very soon,’ she told the children, ‘you will fall asleep.’

Adele woke, alone, in her own bed, to a flat, cold dawn. This was not so unusual, as the
Orageux Bleu
, when night fishing, often didn’t come back into harbour until six, and then there was the unloading of the fish, the work still to be done. But this morning was different. This morning
felt
different. For Jean and Simon had not set sail.

She turned over in the bed. As the chilly depths of the heavy covers shifted around her, she felt the continual yearning in her blood, the craving that had stayed with her ever since that dreadful June last year: a desire for peace, for safety, for a life. How unprepared we all were, she thought, to give up France, to give up our lives. The baby stirred and dealt her a wakeful kick. She thought of the children and whether they had slept; she prayed that they were not as fearful as she was.

Her mother-in-law was at her door, tapping. ‘Are you awake? Simon’s been here already. You must get up.’

Adele hauled herself upright against the headboard, feeling a swell of panic in her chest at the tone of the older woman’s voice.

Madame Ricard walked over to the window. She opened the blackout and stared at the sea.

‘There have been explosions, out on the railway line near Cherbourg.’

‘So,’ Adele ventured carefully, ‘it was a success?’

Madame Ricard turned and stared at her. The grey light from outside gave her wrinkled face a ghostly demeanour. Her eyes, blue like her son’s, were like ice. ‘Depends which way you look at it. Switch on the radio.’

Adele moved swiftly to the wireless in the corner of the bedroom, tying the cords of her dressing gown as she went.
She fumbled with the earpiece. Electricity hummed in the wires, an airwave crackled. Static snapped around the room.

Madame Ricard informed her, ‘Simon came here to tell me, we must send a message. Urgently.’

‘Where is Jean?’ Adele asked, as she bent her head to listen deeply into the earpiece, her fingers on the dial. She heard it immediately:
V for Victory
tapping through the airwaves, a constant covenant; part of her consciousness.

‘He is hiding. Somewhere beyond Valognes. In the
bocage
.’

Adele looked at her mother-in-law.

‘Quickly, quickly … this is what you must send.’ Madame Ricard unrolled a scrap of paper. Adele recognised Simon’s handwriting.

Pole Star sighted. Moon behind the clouds.

Adele flexed her fingers against the cold and began to tap out her appeal.
Do you read? Over. Do you read? Over
. She listened hard for the response. At last, an acknowledgement. She signalled the message slowly, methodically into the airwaves. Over and over again.

‘Please tell me what has happened,’ she asked, as she continued to send the message.

‘I’m not sure that I should.’

‘Is it best that I know nothing about it? Is it that serious?’

Madame Ricard’s dreadful sigh made Adele look sharply at her.

‘I’ll tell you what everyone else in Montfleur will know within the hour,’ she said, her features drooping with unspoken dread. ‘We blew up a troop train near Cherbourg. It did not go as well as expected. The explosives were not the right mix and not enough damage was caused. Not
enough damage compared to the risk that we took. Simon just told me he wishes that Androvsky was still here. He knew his dynamite. He knew how to do it properly.’

Adele shook her head. She didn’t want to waste her time absorbing Simon’s opinions when her husband was not home. When her husband was in danger.

‘Is Jean all right?’ she demanded.

Madame Ricard looked down at her. ‘Yes, but he made a dreadful mistake.’

Adele hurried along the Montfleur streets, her heavily pregnant stomach and grimacing face rousing the startled interest of passers-by. She was desperate to get to the Orlande house quickly to check on the children, take them some food. They were certainly not going to be the maquisards’ priority today, or anytime soon.

In the marketplace small groups of people gathered around the stalls, fingering the scanty produce, and in the bistro, drinking dregs of coffee. Caps and hats were pulled down against the cold. Collars were turned up and glances directed over shoulders. There was a murmuring, like the static from the radio in the bedroom. Adele kept her head down and hurried past, not wishing to catch anyone’s eye. She could not risk a single
bonjour
and give herself away. The news must be filtering through to everyone, as if the shock waves from the bombs on the railway line had infiltrated Montfleur.

As she stepped down the kerb to the side street that led to the house, she felt, more than heard, a heightening of voices, a rippling through the square. Everyone began to face the same direction, jerking their heads for a better view. She, too, stopped and stared. Around the corner of
the
mairie
, a small company of German soldiers marched into the square. They advanced in perfect formation, faceless under rounded helmets, inhuman behind the grey uniform. Shoulder to shoulder, they carried their weapons with chilling command. Not such an unfamiliar sight, Adele told herself, and yet her panic sharpened as the broken-engine sound of a posse of motorbikes followed them, a motorcade for the
Kommandant
’s car. It parked outside the
mairie
. The
Kommandant
got out. The soldiers stood in their ranks, facing the people of Montfleur.