The September Garden (27 page)

‘This is what you wanted, Jean,’ she whispered. ‘This is for you.’

She left her husband and quietly closed the door behind her. She went out of the front door and crossed the small courtyard. She opened the blue gates, hearing the familiar squeak of metal against metal.

‘What the blazes …? Oh, you made me jump!’ It was a British man, sitting on the step, unlacing his boots.

He was alone. A ragged platoon of Tommies was patrolling further along the street, their uniforms in a shocking state. Rifles looked cumbersome and old-fashioned. Revolver holsters were made of thrown-together webbing, and their pockets were torn.
What a rabble
, thought Adele. But then, a shock of compassion sliced through her. Those young men were far from home.

‘So very sorry …’ the man muttered as he pulled off his boots. ‘My perishing feet are killing me.’

The boots were split at the toes and looked like a comical flapping mouth, or something Charlie Chaplin might wear. His socks were torn and his toes poked through.

But he wasn’t a soldier, that much was clear. Somehow, he was altogether more refined and Adele could not work out why. His flecked grey hair had a short cut, but he was in sober civilian clothes that looked rather dilapidated. For a moment, a desperate fear seized her.
Who the hell is he
? Jean had said how the tide could turn and turn again. The war was certainly not over and even now, with British soldiers on the street, her uncertain heart failed her. But when this man smiled at her she felt suddenly, immensely safe, as if he’d earned her total and unexpected trust. He glanced up at her before rummaging in his canvas bag. She blushed as she found herself hypnotised for a moment by the depth of his brilliant blue eyes.

‘Here you are, madame, cigarettes and chocolate,’ he said. His French was good and educated. His inflection perfect.

‘Thank you,’ she said, thinking of Simon, who would be in dire need of them.

‘I think I have my bearings wrong. Last time I was here it was the dead of the night and I was rather worse for wear. You heard me right, madame, worse than I look now. Am I at all near the headquarters of
Esprit Fort
?’

She sat down on the step next to him.

‘The cell has been disbanded,’ she told him. ‘We had an unsuccessful operation in the spring and have not been much help to the cause since then.’

‘Esprit Fort
helped me in 1941,’ he explained. ‘I wanted to let them know that, this time, I would be at their service. I parachuted in a few days ago and mustered with this regiment for the time being,’ he nodded down the street where the soldiers had disappeared, ‘before I rendezvous
with my unit and begin my work. But, to cap it all, these boots have let me down somewhat.’

‘Will you come into the house?’ she asked.

He looked sharply at her, and stood up as she did, but did not speak. She noticed that he’d seen the crude swastika chiselled into the stone gatepost, legacy of Montfleur’s opinion of Monsieur Orlande. As they crossed the small courtyard, she saw him fingering his revolver, glancing up at the windows. She understood. It could be a trap. There were reports of renegade German soldiers hiding out in buildings all over the countryside. She might, for all he knew, be affiliated with one or more of them.

She left him in the hallway and went upstairs to collect Jean’s fishing boots and his thick knitted socks that were waiting to be packed away. She picked out his jacket and good trousers from the wardrobe, too.

The man was waiting, tense and alert, at the bottom of the stairs, his eyes large in the semi-darkness of the shuttered house.

‘Here you are, monsieur,’ she said. ‘Will these be any use to you? My mother-in-law is outside in the garden with the children so please, get changed here in the hall if you like. Or upstairs if you prefer. Would you like some coffee? We have some coffee. Come down to the kitchen when you are ready.’

‘You have a fine house, madame,’ he said, entering the kitchen looking extremely comfortable in Jean’s clothes.

Adele laughed briefly. ‘It is not my house. We are merely sheltering here. It is my employer’s house.’ She stopped herself. She was going to say that the house belonged to the gendarme and Madame Orlande, but did not want to share
the bitter shame of the situation with this British man. This extremely brave, special man.

‘Well, thank you, I can’t tell you how grateful I am. And this coffee …’

‘Is not good?’ Adele smiled.

‘Is the best I’ve tasted, after what I have been through, since I landed off target in a field of cows, four nights ago. I must say, these socks are exceptional. They will keep me warm for many a night.’

‘That’s because they’re fisherman’s socks,’ Adele said, overbrightly.

She busied herself at the table, cutting bread and butter, hoping the man would not see her distress, or her sharp tears, remembering that Jean was lying upstairs in the darkened
salle à manger.

‘Here, sir. Please take some food with you. We are so grateful to you. To all of you.’

‘Thank you, Madame … er?’

‘Ricard.’

‘Ah,’ he said, a recognition falling over his face. ‘Ah,
le pêcheur.’

She felt him staring so hard at her in such absolute deference that she had to look away.

‘How the coincidences occur,’ he mused. ‘In all this chaos and destruction, a beautiful coincidence. Is your husband—?’

‘The least we say about it the better, don’t you think?’ Adele broke in quickly. ‘Please, don’t say any more.’

The sound of Sophie laughing in the garden drifted through the basement window of the kitchen. The man walked over to the window, and looked up, smiling. The
older lady was dozing in a deckchair, Sophie playing on the rug. Pierre’s pram stood in the shade of the high garden wall.

He turned back to Adele and she saw his eyes glistening, his mouth widening, not in a smile, but in an effort to stay straight and to hide the torment behind his eyes.

‘I thought that I, once, was going to have a baby. But then, it was with the wrong girl and it all turned out to be a false alarm.’

‘The wrong girl?’ Adele was confused and a little flustered by this man’s confession and its translation. She thought perhaps she’d misunderstood him. She wrapped the bread up and filled a bottle with milk for him. ‘False alarm? The
wrong
girl? I’m sorry, sir. I don’t understand.’

‘It all happened with the girl that I didn’t love,’ he said. He picked up the bread and milk and stowed it in his bag. He spent a long time checking through what else he had in there, tucking some paperwork safely away, fastening the buckles, placing the strap over his shoulder. At last he looked up at her. ‘You know when someone is … sorry, I’m struggling … I’m trying to find the correct French words to say it. When someone is under your skin?’

Adele looked at him blankly.

‘Someone is inside you. Part of you?’

She nodded and turned her face away. This man was standing in front of her wearing Jean’s clothes. She wanted to shriek with the madness of grief.

‘The girl who I betrayed, she’s the one who is under my skin. I am a fool. An utter bloody fool. And I wish to God everything had been different.’

As Jean had warned her, the tide did turn and turn again three months after the British man left, three months and a day after Jean’s funeral. Madame Orlande came home, liberated from her prison near Paris by triumphant Allied soldiers.

She stood on the doorstep, frail, a bag of bones, her once dark hair a mass of grey. Adele took two steps back, such was her surprise. Madame’s eyes were sunken, her cheeks hollow and lined. She had lost some teeth. What remained was her defensive demeanour, the hesitant but forceful presence that told Adele that her mistress was home.

‘I expected to see him at the station, I expected to see him here. I’ve not heard from him in so long. Where is he?’

Adele followed her into the salon where she looked around, surveying the cracked plaster, boarded-up windows.

‘So you had it rough here?’

Beth looked at her, expectant, waiting for Adele to explain herself.

‘Madame, you have had such an ordeal, please take some refreshment, some wine perhaps?’

‘Where is my husband?’ she demanded and then folded meekly onto the chair. ‘Oh, don’t tell me. Don’t tell me he is dead.’

‘No, Madame.’ Adele sat down opposite her. She spoke carefully, precisely, the way she used to try to explain things to Estella and Edmund. ‘He was accused of collaboration at the time of the liberation. The Allies arrested him. He has been in custody in Paris, as far as we know, since then.’

‘But I’ve just come from there! This is ridiculous. Who is in charge here? Who is the gendarme? The prefecture?’

‘There is an American general at Cherbourg,’ said Adele. ‘He is pretty much in command of the area. But as for Montfleur, they are trying to rebuild everything. Get everything in order. It’s rather chaotic.’

Beth Orlande leant forward, grabbed Adele’s hands.

‘You will stay here with me?’ she demanded, her eyes huge in her ashen face, her bony fingers shaking. She rubbed at the swollen knuckles. Her hands, once so pale and soft, were ruddy, the skin broken, the nails flaking. ‘Will you stay?’

‘Of course. Madame, we actually live here. We’ve been here since the invasion; Monsieur allowed us to. It seemed safer, somehow. My children, Pierre the baby and Sophie, and my mother-in-law Madame Ricard also …’

‘Ah, of course, your fisherman. Yes, I think I can tolerate Madame Ricard. And the Androvskys next door?’

‘Gone,’ said Adele. ‘Years ago.’

Beth Orlande flinched.

Adele broke the silence with the words she dreaded to speak; they always sounded like a lie, trapped in her throat. ‘My husband is dead.’

Madame muttered her sorrow. So many had died, so many gone, it hardly seemed to be a surprise any more.

‘Let’s drink that wine, Adele.’

Adele helped Madame Orlande settle in as best she could. Her fussing and weeping were a timely distraction to the grinding agony of losing Jean, and the questions from Sophie, the little girl’s tears because Papa wasn’t there to read a story, and her own silent weeping deep into the night.

By the time that a week had passed, Madame had
managed to put her firm stamp on the household again; organising but never really understanding. As Madame Ricard whispered to Adele that morning in the kitchen, ‘I’ve never met anyone so self-absorbed.’

‘She’s distraught about her husband,’ Adele said kindly.

‘Her husband isn’t dead.’

Adele looked at her mother-in-law for a moment too long. Their mutual grief blended, grew bigger. Adele turned to the kettle, her voice brittle. ‘Madame Orlande is going to go to the
mairie
this afternoon, to, as she says, get some answers about the gendarme.’

‘Barking up the wrong tree,’ muttered Madame Ricard, her hand twisting through the tea cloth. ‘Not sure I can live here for much longer with her. Let’s go back to the sea wall cottage.’

Adele nodded and picked up the tray of coffee to take to Madame in the salon.

On her way up the stairs, she heard raised voices from the street outside, the distinctive humming noise of a crowd.

‘Oh, listen,’ said Beth, cocking her ear to the window as Adele placed the tray on the table, ‘can you hear the shouting in the square?’

‘Perhaps some news has come through. Another push on the Western Front, perhaps? I’ll ask
Maman
to tune in the radio. Oh, I can hear Sophie crying downstairs. She is so sensitive. Hates any noise from outside, I’ll just go and—’

There came a tremendous hammering on the door and Adele heard Sophie burst into louder crescendos of terror.

‘I’ll answer the door,’ Madame Orlande said, ‘you go to your child.’

As Adele hurried towards the stairs the front door was
opened and she heard barking, urgent voices and then Madame Orlande’s sudden startled cry from the hallway.

Adele turned to see Beth Orlande, her arms pinned to her sides, hauled out of the house and across the yard by three men of Montfleur, one of whom was Simon.

‘What are you doing? What on earth are you doing?’ she yelled, hurrying out of the house. ‘Simon!’

The other men continued to frogmarch Beth away down the street, while Simon paused to wipe sweat from his forehead. His eyes were bright with strange and violent pleasure when he looked at her.

‘Justice,’ he panted. ‘Justice for France. Collaborators like this one are not going to get away with what they’ve done. They have to be taught a lesson.’

‘But, this is Madame
Orlande
! She has been in a prison camp for four years. How can you do this, Simon?’ cried Adele. ‘She’s a lady, a tired, shattered lady. She’s only just been released.’

He waved her away and ran off down the street, along which the frail prisoner was propelled so fast that her feet, still in her slippers, began to drag on the cobbles. Beth was mute, her mouth pressed tight with terror. She glanced frantically over her shoulder at Adele, her eyes opaque with disbelief. Adele followed, bewildered, not knowing what else to do.

Around the square, on buildings broken by Allied shells, the
tricolore
was flying. Some of the flags were ragged, had seen better days, others were crisply pressed, fresh out of armoires. All were signs of pride, defiance, jubilation. The people of Montfleur were cheering, drinking. They started pointing, turning to look, and jeering as Madame Orlande was marched to the centre of the square.

Upright chairs from someone’s
salle à manger
were set out in a row. Her captors forced Beth to sit down. A sign was slung around her neck. Adele pushed her way to the front of the crowd to read the crude scrawl:
collaboratrice
putain
.

‘But she is innocent!’ Adele cried, her voice obliterated by the baying crowd. ‘For goodness’ sake, Simon. What are you thinking? Jean wouldn’t do this.’

‘She’s guilty by association. Keep out of it, Adele,’ he snarled at her. ‘You don’t know the half of it.’

The baker and his wife, and the hairdresser, too, were marched forward and made to sit. How absurd these people looked, dumbfounded, beaten, terrified, sitting on someone’s Sunday best furniture in the middle of the square.