The September Garden (16 page)

‘I can guess where you are going,’ he said. ‘Your knowledge of France, your language, must be an absolute godsend to the chaps. And until such time, I would like to look after you. Make sure you eat something. Here,’ he smiled then, his tension breaking away, ‘at least have some of my bread.’

‘Well, thank you. It’s new bread. Rather good in the circumstances.’ She took a slice and nibbled a corner reluctantly, her stomach feeling full and brimming with curiosity and desire. A God-awful state to find herself in.

‘Alex,’ she said, then was stopped by a memory: a dead rabbit and the turn of the handle of her bedroom door. Her mouth went dry with the return of an old old fear. She had to conquer it with the next breath she took.

‘Alex, does looking after me extend to staying tonight?’

A cold late afternoon, and the clouds were low over Montfleur; the sky dull, like a bruise. Adele decided that spring had forgotten to come to this corner of Normandy as she opened the gate to the Orlande house, flinching at the sound of its brittle squeak. She glanced briefly at the tall facade as she crossed the courtyard. All shutters were closed. The house looked dead.

She opened the front door with her key and stepped into a gloom of chilled grey light. Furniture in the disused
salle à manger
was shrouded in dust sheets, ghostly in the shadows. Along the quiet hallway, doors were shut. Even the clock on the console had stopped. Monsieur no longer bothered to wind it up.

Adele set to performing her duty just as she did every day. She no longer lived at the Orlande house; her home was with her husband Jean and his mother at the cramped cottage under the sea wall.

Downstairs in the kitchen there was a pile of Monsieur’s shirts to iron; some potatoes to peel. He had sausages and onions in the pantry. There was a flagon of wine on the table and rotting apples in a bowl. Adele did not want to continue to work for Monsieur now that she was expecting a baby, and now Madame had gone. But Jean had the notion that it was better if she could get past the door of
l’homme collabo
every day; it might help their cell one way or another – information might be dropped from Monsieur’s lips during his careless wine-soaked moments. Aside from this, Adele wanted to continue to perform Madame Orlande’s parting wish: that she would look after Monsieur and the house. And keep it nice for when Sylvie came home.

Madame’s fate, as an Englishwoman married to a Frenchman, was to be interned. Monsieur’s bribery could not be sustained for ever, could not be indulged longer than seemed appropriate. One dark January morning, two months before, the
Kommandant
had politely and efficiently sent a black car to pick her up. She was to be taken to the station at Cherbourg to travel by train with a British family who lived in Valognes and who had been flushed out by the Gestapo. Their destination, the camp for enemy foreigners at St Denis, Paris. In all honesty, Monsieur said, after being allowed to visit her a month later, life there was tolerable.

‘She is resigned but comfortable,’ he told Adele. ‘She will be able to write a letter once a month.’

He mentioned the extra rations, food parcels from the Red Cross, plenty of fresh air and exercise, even if the yard was surrounded by barbed wire. There was even a theatre. A library. 

‘She is knitting,’ Monsieur had said. ‘Socks for soldiers.
German
soldiers. She has made some new friends. They play cards. At least I know she is safe there. It helps …’ he had swallowed on his words, his face haunted with shame, brushing his moustache with his fingers ‘… it helps that I am who I am … She will be looked after.’

‘Keep Sylvie’s room aired and dusted,’ Beth Orlande had whispered that morning to Adele as she put on her coat in the hall and picked up her small suitcase. Her slender frame had taken on a stooping, hardened look, as if the spirit inside her was trapped and tormented.

Adele had glanced past her, past the open front door, across the courtyard and through the gates to the black car waiting by the kerb.

‘Go carefully, Adele. Take care of everything,’ Madame had said, her voice tiny, her face shrinking with fear, and yet she’d walked out to the car with a dignity and poise that was beyond her duty.

Adele picked up the iron and set it on the range to heat up while she contemplated the pile of Monsieur’s shirts. She felt sick with the relentlessness of it all. A continuous stretch of days sunk with creeping fear and loathing. What was to keep her here, really? A pipe dream of Madame Orlande’s concerning the imagined return of her daughter? Adele indulged her fantasy: her and Jean setting sail in the
Orageux Bleu
and heading out into the choppy waters of
La Manche
, just like the Allied soldiers had done nearly a year before. They would head for England, with Jean navigating, Adele at the helm, escaping the hunger, the degradation, the chains of occupation. Adele envied Sylvie
her freedom. But Jean would hear nothing of it. We fight, he says, we fight them every step of the way. He would never abandon his country, he assured her. And neither, it seemed, should Adele.

A hard, violent thumping on the neighbour’s front door startled her from her thoughts. There was a commotion outside in the street. Adele ran up to the front landing window to see a lorry pull up and soldiers opening the back of it with a hard crash of metal and hinges. The thumping on the Androvskys’ door continued, German voices shouting orders. She hurtled back down to the front door and across the courtyard in time to see two soldiers, rifles slung over their shoulders, pushing a speechless and compliant Madame Androvsky up and into the back of the lorry. Monsieur Androvsky was being shoved by two other soldiers, holding their rifles at him like battering rams. He, too, was forced with indignity into the truck, like an animal on his way to market.

Only then did Adele notice Monsieur Orlande standing on the other side of the road, watching, preening his moustache. She went to open the gate, to run out, to protest, when he stopped her with his bark: ‘Stay where you are, girl. Stay where you are! You will only make it worse.’

From the kerb, she saw Madame’s face pale against her red headscarf. Her eyes, from that distance, were unreadable. She heard Monsieur Androvsky shout from the belly of the truck: ‘I am a schoolteacher. Just a schoolteacher. We are French citizens.
Vive la France!
’

The doors were slammed shut on the couple, truncating his protest, and the truck roared off, swaying as it went, 
over the cobbles. It was all over in a matter of seconds.

Monsieur Orlande muttered something about getting back to work and strolled off.

Adele peered down the street. Doors were closed, windows shut as the truck drove past. Finally, it disappeared around the corner and the subsequent descending silence pressed on Adele’s ears. She froze in shock, standing in the middle of the road with an awful thought spinning around her head:
The children? Where are the children?

The day drifted on and the people of Montfleur went about their business. Adele sat indoors, her nerves shredded, her baby thumping her; her mind wild with fear. It was not until nearly dinner time that she felt brave enough to go round to the back of the Androvsky home. Through the back door she could see chairs upturned, breakfast plates smashed on the floor and left where they fell. Monsieur Androvsky’s morning paper was still propped against the teapot.

She stepped in and tentatively called their names. An immense, horrific thought filled her mind: that they’d been murdered, their little bodies left to be cleared up later, or that the Gestapo were coming back for them and would be here any moment.

Her calling became quieter and quieter, ever more desperate and pathetic through the empty rooms.

But then she heard a shuffling and a weeping and stooped to open the understairs cupboard door. Estella and Edmund were cowering, their dark heads together, crouched in the corner.

‘Papa told us to hide,’ the boy whispered, his face as sharp and pale as a crescent moon. Estella had wet herself. 
She was mute, clutching her doll, running her finger over its face. Her eyes were huge behind her wonky glasses.

Adele hurried them down the garden, behind the back wall, past the stables and through the Orlande garden. She tapped on the salon door as they clung to her skirt, sniffing, flinching, trembling with fright.

‘Monsieur, the children … the children were left behind …’ She was panting with fear, needing his guidance. Imploring his help.

Claude Orlande looked up from his paperwork, his brow furrowing with anger and unease. She expected him to bellow; she braced herself for it. But he pondered, his eyes opaque and unreadable. Eventually, he exhaled through his moustache.

‘Take them upstairs, out of my sight,’ he told her, dismissing her with a wave of his large hand. ‘Hide them in the spare room, the one little Nell stayed in, until I decide what to do with them.’ 

She had not been to London for a long while. Her job was frantic and consuming, as was her mother with her sorrow and her need for attention. Nell was trapped at home with her, her horizon severely truncated, and she experienced a rather foul twist of envy when she considered Sylvie’s escape to the city.

As her train sped through the outskirts, she saw the thin church spire atop Harrow-on-the-Hill, the trees shrouding the old school up there and, close to the railway’s edge, suburban bay windows and gardens. She wondered whether her father, now ensconced with Diana Blanford up on that hill, was able to paint still; whether he missed the lanes and fields of Lednor. Were there enough birds for him to spot here among the streets and avenues? She could barely imagine so. Travelling so enticingly close to her father’s new home, his new life, she sensed the distance yawn even greater between them. 

She walked from Marylebone station, following Sylvie’s directions: cross over the Marylebone Road, go past the wrecked shop on the corner of Dover Street with the Union Jack outside and a sign that says
Bombed but not beaten
. The church with the air raid shelter sign on it will be on her left. The mews was opposite, down the cobbled lane off Montague Place. Look for the one with the green door. Sylvie greeted her in her dressing gown, with her face covered in cold cream and huge curlers in her hair. She looked rather harassed, her expression quite startling.

‘Plans have changed,’ she said, beckoning Nell inside. ‘Quick, shut the door before my neighbours see me. I look a fright.’

Nell walked straight upstairs into a neat first-floor sitting room, put her overnight case down and commented on what a lovely little place it was.

‘It’s not mine for much longer, that’s why it’s so tidy. I’ve packed away all my knick-knacks,’ said Sylvie. ‘I catch the midday from Paddington tomorrow. And so much for my farewell party. My department has some urgent crisis on. I told them, what crisis isn’t urgent? Anyway, none of them can make it to the supper club. So it’s all going to be a bit quiet.’ She walked into the tiny kitchen, filled the kettle and set it on the gas ring. She called out. ‘Just four of us, in fact.’

Nell said that it was no matter. In fact, she was relieved that there was not going to be a large crowd. These things happen all the time, she supposed. You can never plan for anything. ‘It’s something Mrs B moans about the most,’ she told Sylvie. ‘That and the quality of the tea.’

‘I have a good little stash here,’ said Sylvie, bringing 
in a tray. ‘Courtesy of some contacts who shall of course remain nameless.’

‘Mother sends her love,’ said Nell, accepting a cup and taking a sip. It was, in fact, exceptionally good tea. ‘She was awfully worried about me coming up to town, as she has been about you living here for the last year. But I kept telling her the raids have eased off.’ Nell pondered on how the raids had become the least of her worries. ‘And at least you’ll be out of it tomorrow.’

‘Have you heard from your dad?’

‘He writes occasionally. I had a letter, a month ago. He seems quite well. Quite settled. I’ll show it you.’ Nell drew the letter out of her bag and Sylvie scanned it briefly, glancing at her.

‘Don’t be sad,’ she coaxed. ‘I hope you’ve got your best dress and dancing shoes in that suitcase, for tonight we are going to dance away that look on your face.’

Nell smiled gratefully at Sylvie. She hadn’t seen her cousin for months and was struck at how much more beautiful she looked. Despite being shiny with cold cream, her face was as divine and inscrutable as ever.

Upstairs in the bedroom, Nell changed into her long silk evening dress and dancing slippers. At Sylvie’s dressing table she applied her lipstick and rouged her cheeks. The slate grey of her dress made the green of her eyes shimmer. She tucked a smokey-jade corsage behind her ear.

Not too bad, she decided. If only she could extinguish that little shadow of despair in her eyes.

Hearing a knock at the front door below, she leant over to the window, straining to catch sight of whoever it might be. All she could see was a few puddles on the 
cobbles and the top of a man’s head, sleek with Brylcreem.

Sylvie opened the door, exclaiming crossly in French and saying that he was too early, her voice ringing along the mews. The door shut and Sylvie rushed upstairs.

‘Henri’s here,’ she said, peeling off her dressing gown and wiping furiously at her face with a tissue. ‘I’ve told him off for being premature, but his excuse was that he needed to put the champagne on ice.’

‘Champagne!’ cried Nell in delight. ‘And who is Henri?’

‘From the department. He managed to pull some strings and get away. He’s always a good old egg.’ Sylvie hurriedly combed out her hair so that it fell in inky waves over her shoulders. ‘Very attractive, as you will see in a few moments. I thought, perhaps, you might like him.’

‘Might I?’ Nell sat on the bed and folded her hands on her lap. She glanced at herself in the mirror and saw a look in her eye that she did not like: a touch of fear, a shimmer of regret. ‘I will see about that. Oh, what a lovely dress.’

It was scarlet, as bold and beautiful as its wearer. Ruched and pleated, it skimmed Sylvie’s bosom and hips, a slit revealing her long legs to just above her knee.

‘Lend me your powder puff, Nell,’ she said. ‘I need to take some of this shine off.’

Someone else knocked at the door.

‘Oh, who else?’ asked Nell, as she heard Henri’s footsteps going down the stairs to the front door.

Sylvie blazed a swift look at her from beneath her eyelashes.

‘Come on, are you ready, little Nell?’ She grabbed her hand. ‘Let’s get to that champagne.’ 

As she stood up, Nell heard the male voices of greeting below, and felt a shadow cover her heart.

‘Who is it?’ she asked, disbelieving her instinct.

‘Champagne!’ cried Sylvie, pulling her towards the stairs.

They reached the sitting room, just as the two gentlemen came up the steps from the front door.

‘Nell,’ said Sylvie. ‘Dear Nell, look who I found.’

Something cold and hard gripped her round the throat as Alex Hammond walked into the room.

‘Nell, it’s so very good to see you.’ He walked forward and grasped her hand to shake it with delicate courtesy.

His touch lingered and her hand trembled. He was there, right there. She stared openly, immobilised. Her memories from the last year, all the desire and the wondering and the regret, spun together making a whirlpool in her head.

‘But how?’ she asked, her voice distant and weak. ‘Alex, how?’

Her cousin and Henri were laughing. ‘See what happens in these strange and dangerous times,’ Sylvie said. ‘I bumped into him in a pub a few months ago. Isn’t that absolutely marvellous?’

Nell sat down, hardly able to breathe. She continued to gaze at Alex, fascinated by him, her thoughts spinning. She plucked restlessly at the strap of her gown as Henri handed her a glass of champagne.

‘Take a sip,’ said Alex, sitting opposite her. ‘It will do you good.’

She did just as he said, automatically, because she trusted him, she knew him, but now, suddenly enormously shy, she could barely look at him. 

‘I simply don’t believe it,’ she whispered.

Alex leant forward. ‘Are you all right?’

She lifted her head to look him full in the face, and it was like looking into the sun. His ebony-black evening suit was sublime; she’d forgotten how blue his eyes were. He was smiling.

‘How’s Kit?’ he asked.

Her shock burst out of her in a tremendous, earthy laugh.

‘Oh, that old blanket. Very well indeed.’

Alex’s expression was mercurial: sorrow chasing delight.

‘You look beautiful in that dress.’

She wanted to say,
and you look beautiful too
, but her astonishment kept hitting her in hard waves and it was enough to stay sitting upright, holding her champagne glass steady.

Sylvie bounced onto the arm of the chair and put her hand on her shoulder.

‘See?’ she said, clearly delighted with herself. ‘See how you can never plan for anything these days?’

As they glided up the escalator to Piccadilly Circus ticket hall, Nell became giddy with excitement, her stomach jittery. Alex was near her, Alex was with her – and she had thought she would never see him again. Even though the lights had been switched off all over the country and gloom settled so deeply that it was hard to recall a time when it wasn’t all dreariness, she enjoyed taking in the jolly couples, the glint of medals pinned to pockets, particularly splendid make-do-and-mend hats.

The sky over the West End was as pink and as luminous 
as the inside of a shell. Warm midsummer evening air settled over crowds out in search of merriment. The four of them crossed Regent Street and plunged into the streets of Mayfair, where grand stucco houses glowed white in the soft light.

‘Ha,’ said Henri, ‘I see they’ve all still got their railings. This is how it is, with you British. Only the poor people give them up for Spitfires.’

‘Oh, shush,’ Sylvie said. ‘As well you know, Henri, you and I might as well be classed as British now, so you better get used to the whys and wherefores of this strange nation.’

She linked her arm through Henri’s, leaving Nell to walk behind beside Alex. They had not spoken much amid the flurry of the champagne and the trot off to Baker Street station. On the crowded tube train, Alex had kept a polite distance from Nell and she was grateful to him. She was struggling, but little by little, as her shock faded, or at least, as she got used to it, the memory of last summer returned as a reality. And her guilt embraced her. She had inexplicably, brutally, sent Alex on his way. She looked at him now in the evening light of the Mayfair street and wondered over and over again –
why?

‘Here we are,’ said Sylvie, lifting her gown and stepping carefully down some steps. ‘The Velvet Rose.’

‘Oh good,’ said Alex. ‘A basement, where we can feel nice and safe.’

Nell glanced from her cousin to Alex and back again and was struck suddenly by panic: why had Sylvie never mentioned before that she’d met Alex in London?

The doorman doffed his top hat and opened the door onto the marble lobby where walls were hung with drapes of berry-red velvet. There were little gold crowns 
embroidered onto the corners of the fabric and engraved onto the opaque glass doors.

‘They have a royal appointment, no less,’ Sylvie confided, handing her coat to the attendant. ‘Wonder who will be in tonight?’

‘This girl never ceases to amaze me,’ said Henri. ‘She takes you to all the best places, doesn’t she, Alex, old man?’

Nell paused as she unbuttoned her coat. What Henri said and the way he was laughing was loaded with meaning. She glanced at Alex.

‘Well, we have to make the best of everything, these days, don’t we?’ said Sylvie, blandly.

The maître d’ held open the double doors and Nell found herself in the half-light of a hexagonal room, muffled by sumptuous plum velvet. The air was heady with cigar smoke and perfume, and tinkling with conversation. Lamps were suspended over tables edged in shimmering mother-of-pearl. Couples sat close, leaning in to one another; parties were gay, animated, raising their glasses. On the dais a five-piece in smart evening suits dashed out a light swing tune.

They sat in a plush semicircular booth and the waiter brought champagne and oysters. Alex was next to her, and his closeness made her insides float and then knot with confusion. While Henri and Sylvie whispered and giggled next to them, tucking into oysters, Alex politely asked her about her job.

‘I am enjoying it very much, thank you. I have filed quite a good many stories. My editor seems pleased,’ Nell told him hesitantly. ‘They reduced the size of the newspaper again this week, to save paper.’

‘And there’s no lemons to squeeze,’ interjected Sylvie as 
she scooped up another oyster. ‘Same old story. Here goes. Bottoms up.’ She threw her head back and tipped the shell against her mouth. Henri reached over to dab the drip of juice on her chin with his napkin.

The lights dimmed and a sharp spotlight hit the dais as the singer came on to a ripple of applause. Her soft, deep voice breathed into the microphone, sending shivers down Nell’s spine. ‘
I get along without you very well …
’

Unexpected tears stung her eyes. In the rose-pink half darkness, she felt Alex take hold of her hand and rub his thumb around her palm. A sudden thought trapped her. In the bedroom at the mews house Sylvie had said that she had Henri in mind for her. But why say that, when she knew her and Alex’s history? It was as if it no longer mattered. And when Henri spoke just now by the cloakroom, he seemed to know more about Alex and Sylvie than Nell could ever imagine.

Alex’s touch in the darkness was beautiful and excruciating, but completely inappropriate. She couldn’t quite believe what was happening. An evening with Sylvie’s colleagues to say goodbye as she was leaving for her new job was what she’d expected. And now here she was in seductive light, listening to a sentimental song with Alex Hammond holding her hand.

She pulled away from him and clasped her hands firmly in her lap. She lifted her chin and tried to concentrate on the beauty of the song, sensing Alex looking at her in the soft light. And, once again, she wanted to flee.

She woke with a crick in her neck and eased her eyes open slowly as slivers of memory fitted themselves together. 
Sylvie’s sofa was just that little bit too short for her. She stretched her legs, thinking of the champagne, oysters and the dancing. Dancing with Henri, then with Alex. To dance with Henri was a whirlwind of banter and flirting; to dance with Alex was torture. He’d held her politely at a distance. Suddenly, he was a stranger again, neither of them knowing what to say to one another. A hundred questions poised and unsaid between them.

As she danced, her feet foolish and leaden, Nell had glanced occasionally back to the booth and wondered why Sylvie enjoyed meddling so much; setting up the evening and watching her subjects circle one another. As it was, the club closed earlier than expected because, as one was wont to hear all the time, there was a war on. Henri started to talk about a little drinking den he knew off Neal Street but, to Nell’s relief, Sylvie declared she was tired, and needed her bed – after all she still had some packing to do in the morning. Henri hailed a cab for them. Alex stood by and waited, saw Nell into the cab. His face was unreadable as he said goodbye. Nell in her inexperience and confusion didn’t even acknowledge him, but laughed instead at Henri running off to flag another cab and then falling over the kerb and onto his backside.