The Sea Garden (13 page)

“I don't care.”

Silence.

“All right. I hope what I say will not shock you.”

Marthe shook her head.

“Even now I cannot tell you too much. There are aspects I know nothing about. No one knows everything, except for the chiefs. Knowledge is a dangerous commodity in these times. If we have kept certain things from you, you must accept that it was for the safety of all of us.”

 

T
hey had begun by helping to repatriate Allied airmen and escapees. For weeks, sometimes months, the men were looked after at the lavender farm, gathering their strength in sunlight by doing light work in the fields, hiding in plain view while they waited for the local guides who would take them on to the port at Marseille. These British and American men, sometimes a Pole or Czech who flew for the RAF, were hidden among the Spanish and Portuguese and the other refugee workers who had moved south when this was still the
Zone Libre.
If the Germans ever came to check, their lack of good French could be explained away. But thanks to Musset's tightrope walk playing the collaborator, they were mostly left alone.

Over the past year, their links with the Resistance had strengthened. Auguste had drawn them closer into active circles. At Céreste there lived a man who in another life had been a poet; this gentle but passionate man had built up cells of resistance across the region, all playing their part, all in contact with other cells, all links in the chain. The idiosyncratic messages broadcast from London to friends and family in France on the BBC were coded instructions to the partisans.

“They confirm the imminent arrival of parachute drops and landings. The British send us weapons by air. Explosives. Clothes and shoes too sometimes. Planes that land in the dead of night with no lights. We are all working together to regain our country. Now, I am only ever going to tell you only as much as you need to know.”

Marthe nodded eagerly, hardly able to believe what he was telling her.

“What we need is your expertise in communication.”

“My expertise?”

“After they got old Pineau, we knew we had to keep wireless communications to a minimum. The authorities can track the signals too easily. It's too dangerous to use radios between themselves—we have to keep our capacity to contact the British agents on the ground and for them to contact London. The fallback system has always been to leave messages in known locations, but many of these are now unsafe. There's no such thing as a safe house anymore, and we can't put more people in danger.

“Anything written down, even in code, would be suspicious. But if we designed a wrapper for the soap, containing no additional note nor markings—any visible markings—”

“Braille.”

“Yes, exactly so.”

“Just tell me what you want me to write, and I will do it.”

“Good girl.”

“But what about a translator?”

“That's the other matter for which I need your help. Who can read Braille that you know you can trust absolutely?”

“Which area?”

“Over towards Apt, ideally. Aix. Sisteron.”

Her mind was already working through her old friends from school. Renée, of course. And Elise too. She could trust them.

“Renée lives in Apt now. She has a job in the music shop.”

“Good. That's a very good start. All the best drops have plenty of people legitimately going in and out.”

“There will be others . . . Elise is at Forcalquier now, and there's another girl, Jeanne, who comes from Aix. We will all work so diligently—we were taught well at the school!”

The prospect of the months to come was thrilling. Her tasks would be as absorbing as they were mysterious and exciting. But first there were other questions she needed to ask. “The men in the barn . . . ,” she said.

“We decided to bring some of our . . . foreign guests up here last week. It won't be long now until they can move on, and it's safer that they are here while the final arrangements are being made.”

“They said they were waiting for someone called Caspian who was a philosopher.”

There was a loaded pause. “I am Caspian,” said M. Musset. “We don't use our real names, it's too dangerous. Also known as the Philosopher. I will have to speak to them. We've made a narrow room for them behind tall stacks of hay, and they are supposed to stay completely quiet if they hear anything at all outside. But obviously they have not been as careful as they should be.”

At last she understood.

“It won't be long now,” said Monsieur. “We're waiting for the full moon. When the moon is full, a plane is coming for them.”

Resistance. What was resistance but the will to survive? Like roots in the winter ground, they had been dormant, but when the sun warmed the soil, they would push up to emerge into the air again, every cell remembering the blueness of the sky, each tiny bud coiled tight and ready to burst out.

“I wore your violet perfume today,” said Arlette. “Violet for modesty, to tell our people at Céreste that all is quiet but well. It sent a beautifully clear message. There were many compliments. Even our man Candide, pretending to be drunk as usual in the café, sniffed appreciatively.”

“I am learning so much,” said Marthe to Arlette as they said good night. “But I'm not frightened.” That was not quite true. But she had been far more frightened of being cast adrift by the Mussets.

It was extraordinary, thought Marthe, how they had adapted to living in constant terror of discovery. At first it was exhausting. Then exhaustion and tension became normal, it seemed. It was extraordinary; yet another way the human body and mind adapted to circumstance.

 

T
here were two of them in the barn, and they were both Americans.

Arlette took Marthe with her when she brought food to the men. Arlette stood guard by the open door while they wolfed chickpea stew. It was the best they could offer that day.

Marthe sat on the straw. After a while they spoke to her. At first it was a conversation
in rondo
, one of those songs where the same tune and words are sung at different intervals. Their responses clashed and misfired. One of them could hardly speak French, just single words he had picked up. But the other could speak surprisingly well after months on the run through France.

His name was Kenton Attwater, and he was a twenty-three-year-old navigator in a plane called a Fortress that had been shot down somewhere close to Grenoble. He had managed to bail out, and his parachute brought him down uninjured but for a few gashes and bruises.

“I was lucky. It was a wild, remote place. There was no one watching me come down.”

He had buried the parachute and run into woodland where he hid until it was dark. At night he walked south. When he became so hungry that he had no choice but to take a chance on an isolated farmhouse, he was welcomed and fed.

“That was my second piece of luck. They let me rest in a barn, and the next day they brought a man to see me. I thought he must have been OK because he carried a British gun. He brought me that night to the next safe house.”

It took two months of resting and moving on at night, each time with a different guide, before he had arrived at Auguste's lavender fields.

“When we came over the hill there was a great cliff high in the sky but deep in shadow. It was a threatening place—the whole mountain was looming over us, purple and black. But in front of it was a smaller hilltop with a church on top and a very few houses, and this small hill was lit gold by the sun like a spotlight. I'll never forget it. I couldn't tell you why, but I felt safe.”

“You
are
safe,” said Marthe. “There are so many complicated ways the mountains and valleys and plateaux link together here—that's our secret weapon. And you know, some of these farms and houses were built in the time of the Romans. The thick stone walls are defences, and the dry stone walls that drop down the terraces provide secret enclosures. We can see who is coming up here, and we can be ready.”

“From a flying fortress to an old one,” the American said grimly.

“How long were you at Auguste's farm?”

“Almost a month. That's where I ran into Scotty.”

“Who's Scotty?”

“My friend here. Gunner Scotty Davis from Detroit. He's been in a prisoner-of-war camp. He managed to escape—that's quite something! He's lucky, too. He got a pack of playing cards in a food parcel. So he started a poker school. Two days later there's a letter telling them in code to drop the cards in a bucket of water. Turned out the cards were a fifty-two-part map of the route to Switzerland. So he started figuring out how he could use it.” He laughed. “And would you look at that, there he goes again, taking his chances!”

“What do you mean?”

“He hasn't wasted much time with Arlette over there!”

“I can't look at that.”

“Sorry?”

“I can't see that. Or anything else.”

“You're blind? I didn't know. I mean, now you tell me, I can see it, but I—ah, no, I shouldn't have put it like that—I . . . I'm sorry.”

“You mustn't feel sorry for me. I don't.”

In some ways they were all the same now. So many people stumbling around in the dark, just as she was. All across Europe there were secret roads along which men and women were moving, some towards safety, others farther into darkness. One false step. Lives in the balance. So much unknown.

 

W
ork at the perfume factory continued at a frenetic pace. Marthe spent hours each night at the farmhouse with her slate and stylus. The packages of soap with their embossed wrappers, different scents bearing different messages, were delivered to a hotel in Apt. The messages were transcribed and passed on verbally at the music shop a few narrow streets away. In Céreste, the Poet generously gave board and lodging to a blind refugee. He too was an eager recipient of soap, and wasted no time in organising his own distribution network.

The end was nearing, they could feel it. On June 6 millions of Allied soldiers had landed in Normandy and were breaking through from the north. But the dangers had increased. In Reillanne a medieval convent on the hill had been used for several years as a hostel for those who had fled the north, and other foreign workers. In an act of pure viciousness, fifty-four Jewish workers who had lived quietly among them were deported. In the nearby village of Saint-Michel the inhabitants were woken by pounding on their doors and ordered to gather in the square in front of the Mairie. A senior officer of the Milice stood on the steps and read out a transcript of Pétain's speech: “People of France, do not worsen your unhappiness with acts that risk calling tragic reprisals upon yourselves . . .”

On July 4 a Gestapo officer was killed by a sniper in Aix, and only a matter of hours afterwards every one of the inhabitants—men, women, and children—of the hamlet of Les Figuiers was either gunned down or burnt alive in their homes.

There was despair among the resistants that the raid on the convent at Reillanne had taken place before they had any chance of stopping it. But there was also a terrible suspicion that factions within the Resistance, specifically the Communists, had their own political agenda; and that it suited their purposes to pick off German officers to provoke these cruel retaliations.

But there were successes too. Thanks to the saboteurs, no more trains were running on the two main lines that reached down from the Alps, from Grenoble to Aix and from Briançon to Livron.

“And now we're winning control of the roads,” boasted Auguste. “The Boches are only driving in convoys now; you won't find a car venturing out singly. Neither do the motorcycle couriers roar around like they used to. Even the checkpoints are being drawn back to the outskirts of the towns where they have men stationed. The tide is turning, and they are practically prisoners where they're garrisoned.”

“You be careful. It won't be as easy as you make out,” said M. Musset.

“It's true. They only go outside to get more supplies.”

“Or to effect some more reprisals.”

“When they go out, there's a fifty-fifty chance they're going to be attacked. The forces of the Maquis are being unleashed, and they're unstoppable. We're the ones who know the terrain and the back roads. Wherever they turn, there's a chance they'll be met by gunfire, hemmed in. They won't risk it now. I'm telling you, the roads are almost all ours.”

M. Musset kept his counsel. His pauses and silences had always been eloquent, and now they held a restraint that gave Marthe goose bumps.

“You just be careful. Never assume. Never believe entirely what you haven't proved for yourself. We don't need dead heroes. And remember, if any one of us is caught, it will be the end for all of us.”

5

Citrus and Pine

July–August 1944

I
t was a Thursday, and Arlette had gone to Céreste as usual. A warm sirocco wind of the kind that sprinkled red dust like paprika and caught in the throat had strengthened throughout the afternoon. Now it sent dry leaves skittering across the ground and tugged at loose clothing.

By four the clock was already ticking ponderously. By five the faintest noise suggested Arlette's safe arrival home, and their hopes rose. Every sense was on alert. Another
ting-ting
from the clock, the quarter hour, made the temperature drop and stopped the heart for a few seconds. Musset's cigarette smoke.

Marthe's hands stopped moving on her book, fingertips resting on the raised patterns of the open page. She could all but feel the twitch of the minute hand on the clock. She sensed the wind stirring the valley, rolling like waves over the silence, gaining ascendency over the hills, the almond and apricot orchards, ruffling the olive groves and meadows, over the road that should have brought the bus from Céreste.

She tried to imagine the bus on the road: Arlette in the clumsy vehicle as it climbed, watching as the plain unfurled. I cannot see her, Marthe thought, but neither can any of us.

All those months when she had not understood why the Mussets worried so much about Arlette's trips to Céreste . . . Now, for all that the waiting for her to return was both terrible and frightening, it was shot through with a complicated, proud, painful happiness for Marthe: she was truly a part of life with the Mussets again, within the enchanted citadel where scent was the spell.

 

A
t six o'clock Arlette was still not back.

Monsieur reached for his jacket. Keys and coins jingled. “I'm going to walk down to the village,” he said. “Perhaps something has happened to the bus.” He kept his voice even, but a raw edge gave him away.

“You do that, my dear.”

He paused by the door to pat his pockets. Outside he whistled for the large black mongrel who usually accompanied him. His feet crunched on the gravel, and the dog's paws provided a lighter counterpoint.

“Best he goes to meet her. No use sitting around doing nothing useful,” said Mme Musset, though she too was unable to disguise the strain in her voice.

Marthe got up. “What would you like me to do? I'll start peeling some vegetables for dinner, shall I?”

“That's the idea. They'll be bounding up the path before we've got the pans ready.”

They worked side by side, in silence.

 

T
he clock struck eight. The food, such as they could find, was ready. It waited, covered, on the stove. Mme Musset brewed a tisane. They sipped wordlessly.

When M. Musset returned at almost ten, he was with Auguste.

“We're not sure what's happened—”

“She's been taken,” said Auguste.

Madame gave a cry, as if she was in pain.

“We don't know what's happened,” said Monsieur. “There's every chance she is fine, that there's a simple explanation. We must not think the worst.”

“How? Why?” Madame was not convinced by her husband's attempt at calm.

“I'm not sure exactly what happened, but I cycled over to Pierrevert and telephoned the Woodcutter from there.”

“They have arrested Candide,” blurted out Auguste.

Monsieur lit a cigarette. “No, we don't know for certain. It's only a rumour. Candide was in the café hunched over his newspaper as usual until five o'clock—the patron confirmed it. But Arlette wouldn't have spoken to him. That was the point. And he would never have made a mistake. They were both always careful. . . .”

“Do you think she might have—”

Auguste was cut off by a knock at the door. They hadn't even heard an approach.

There was a tangible ripple of panic as they realised their conversation might have been overheard. Then Musset flung open the door.

It was their neighbour Etienne, an elderly beekeeper who lived one field down the hill. “Have you heard anything?” He had a wheeze in his voice. He had followed them on the path up as quickly as he could.

“
Hélas
, no.”

“I'm going to Céreste in the morning with my honey, Victor. I will keep my eyes and ears open.”

“We would be most grateful.”

“Wouldn't have had her down as the running away sort.”

“No . . .”

An awkward moment passed, during which their neighbour would normally have been invited to take a drink and a bite to eat. Etienne hesitated, then seemed to understand that this was no time for social niceties, and bid them good night.

They waited until they were sure he had gone. “How much does he know?” asked Madame.

“Nothing. Only that Arlette seemed to have missed the bus. I bumped into him on my way down to find Auguste. But he knew straightaway from my face that something was up.”

“What now?” asked Madame.

“There's nothing we can do about Etienne.”

“I don't seriously doubt his intentions . . . but—”

“No . . . no . . . I'm sure you're right. In the morning I'm going to go down to Céreste. Until we know what exactly has happened . . . well, that's all we can do.”

 

M
arthe lay awake on her iron bed. Only a few days earlier Arlette had come back to the distillery from a trip to Forcalquier where she had taken a large order. Marthe had added a few drops of pine needle essence to a citrus peel infusion, and the pervading aromatic warmth made them both nostalgic for August evenings by the sea to the south.

“Pine for hope,” said Marthe. “And I'm going to try amber for timelessness.”

“Hope,” said Arlette. “Our instincts are always for hope. There's something rather mysterious but wonderful about that.”

“I'm not sure it is mysterious, actually. Surely instincts are the result of noticing tiny details that the body processes quickly.”

“So quickly that it seems you were anticipating all along . . . an animal intuition. . . . You're right, we do it all the time without thinking.”

“Exactly.”

Thinking about that conversation reassured Marthe a little. Arlette would be all right; she would read the signs and act accordingly. She
would
. She must not think of the other things she and Arlette had discussed. The only certainty was that others were watching.

She heard the cocks crow into an empty morning, and M. Musset departing on his bicycle soon after sunrise. Her stomach contracted, but she knew she would not be able to eat.

 

M
usset returned at midday. “Cabot's finding out what he can. But Céreste stinks with informants, he says. Infested by Waffen-SS too.”

Not all the gendarmes in Céreste were on the side of the Milice. Cabot was a living reminder of the fact that the police had once been trusted members of the community. Without a flicker of recognition, he had once pushed Auguste back onto the Digne bus just as a convoy of Waffen-SS and Milice were heard on the approach to the other side of the village. They rounded up five men that day, and only two returned.

Musset and Auguste had been to the village in the Woodcutter's van, the most reliable transport for underground business. “We sent word with a small boy to the Poet in the old quarter, then met him casually by the water pump. He had no information, but they're putting the word out about a young woman, about so tall, with her hair up in a blue scarf and lavender print apron, an innocent bystander. The last anyone seems to have seen of her, she was walking out of the café at about the time the bus was expected.”

Musset recounted the events in a voice so flat it seemed the life had been kicked out of him: a man in a three-piece tweed suit and round tortoiseshell glasses had seemed on the point of admitting to a sighting, but then quickly took his leave when a van sped past; shutters banged shut; a grey car the size of a boat had swayed to a stop outside the Mairie, and four German officers had gone in. Then nothing.

Then, as Musset and Auguste left the café, a man walked up behind them. “ ‘The Milice arrested a man who was in the café the previous afternoon, a thick-set man who played the drunk, pretending to read a newspaper,' that's what he said. ‘Played the drunk,' those were his exact words. Which is worrying—”

“You didn't ask him about a girl?”

“Too risky. The last thing I wanted to do was to come right out with it that they were connected—that I was connected too.”

“So you've no idea who this chap was you were talking to?” asked Madame.

“Never seen him before. He was about my age, dressed as a farmer. I didn't want to ask, and didn't want to give away more than I had to. According to him, anyway, the Milice had a busy day yesterday. They had a man held in the cells of the police station—the man who was taken from the café. That's all he knew.”

“What now?”

“There's nothing we can do. The Poet is getting a message to the Engineer, but after that, all we can do is sit tight.”

“If she's been arrested, they'll know that she's the girl from Distillerie Musset,” Marthe said.

“I expect so. All we can do is accept that she must have been taken, along with Candide—and try to find out what's going on.”

Which was exactly what the Milice would be doing too. Everyone knew that they had their methods. Words that were not spoken.

“If they have Arlette, they will connect her to us.”

Arlette in Céreste with the deliveries. The messages in Braille wrapped around cakes of soap. The other blind girls waiting to act as translators, in Apt and Reillanne, Banon and Saint-Christol. A spider's mesh of tiny strands, only visible when the sun caught their beads of dew.

“Arlette will never break,” said Marthe. “She wouldn't even tell me what she was doing, though I begged her to explain. She never did—it was only when she saw how I might have the answer to the problem of how to send new messages.”

“She's young and pretty—she'll charm her way out of there,” said Auguste, with a confidence that no one believed, though they wanted to so badly.

They heard nothing.

 

T
he feeling of threat intensified. If Arlette did not return, then sooner or later the Milice would come in her place. There was only a week to go before the night flight, when the Americans would be taken north over the mountains to the clandestine landing strip.

Kenton and Scotty were moved out of the barn. Marthe's room on the ground floor had a trapdoor. A small room adjoining the Mussets' contained a staircase up to the low attic, which led to another route out of the house.

Kenton was the taller and the less agile; he would find the roof space harder to pass through. And Scotty had only the most rudimentary grasp of French, so it was better he be shielded by the Mussets. Kenton would sleep on Marthe's floor, ready to spring up if anyone arrived suddenly in the night. They had practiced the drill. Marthe knew exactly how to close the trapdoor and pull the bed into the right position over it.

The first night before they all retired, Marthe advanced on the two boys with a scent bottle and sprayed.

“Hey! What's this?”

“A distillation made of pepper and lavender. It puts dogs off the scent. They might bring dogs.”

The American was solicitous, only knocking on her door when she assured him she was already in her little iron-framed bed. Then he came in, shut the door quietly, and lay down on a mat and a padded bedspread. She heard his breathing, but she hardly dared to speak to him. Perhaps he was already sleeping, already on his way back to a country far away.

She lay awake, her head too full. When she finally dozed off, she dreamed of waiting for the full moon. First an evening when the western sky flamed, sending great fingers of rich red light up the slopes through the trees, then the rise of the great disc that silvered the night. Then Arlette lost in a forest. The Gestapo taking Candide to Forcalquier. If he talked, they were all as good as dead. Who had betrayed them, no one knew.

She was awake again, heart pounding. Across the floor, the airman was still breathing evenly.

 

T
he Milice came on the third night.

A movement on the gravel path alerted them. For the first time she understood why the approach had been covered in tiny stones. Then their own dogs barking. She reached out wordlessly for Kenton, felt urgently for his shoulder. He started. A soft shuffling and he had left her side. He must have sprung like an athlete into the hole.

Marthe too played her part quickly and smoothly.

Her heart was pounding as she lay back in bed, now positioned over the trapdoor.

Fear pulled her skin tight. It was a hot night, but the sheet felt cold where her sweat-soaked nightdress stuck to her back.

A whistle blew. The dogs barked loudly, and there was an eruption of harsh shouts and boots stamping outside. Blows crashed down on the wood of the front door, then the kitchen door.

M. Musset shouted back at them from the bedroom window. Whatever did they want? What was so important it couldn't wait for the morning?

“Open up! Open up!”

Leather boots on the tiled floors, drawing closer. Heavy footfalls on the stairs and along the corridor to Marthe's room.

When the man came to the door, she was already waiting for him, blinking with sleep.

“What's in here? Get out of the way!”

She turned her head away from his voice and said, “What is happening, what is going on . . . ?” A feeble voice, slightly stupid. “Who are you?”

The first brush of his arm against her, as if he was about to push her aside. “What does it look like is going on?” He smelled of rank garlic sausage.

Marthe put out her hands, feeling for the door frame but making an obvious, fumbling job of it.