The Silent Hours (20 page)

ISABELLE

There is a wedding today – Claudette’s younger sister is marrying a boy in the village, about the only one left. As a farmer he might be left alone a while longer. They’re both eighteen.

We are making our way to the church. Papa is pushing the big, old, navy-blue pram down the street. It bounces over the cobbles and makes Sebastien gurgle from inside. Grown women smile and coo before they have even peered over to see the baby inside. Papa reaches down now and again to tuck in a stray corner of blanket. A needless action, but one we all do: any excuse to fuss over him.

There are still a few stares, a few whispers behind gloved hands, but I link arms with Maman and pretend not to notice. I can feel her bristling as we walk. She looks soft today, wearing cream suede gloves Papa bought her years ago in Saint-Junien, and a floral dress that he loves. I’m wearing an old tea dress and finally feel my waist has returned. A tiny veiled hat is perched on top of my hair – which needs a trim – and as I look through the netting, the whole street has been divided into tiny little squares.

The church has been decked out in flowers, in stands around the edge and on the end of pews in small bunches. The light grey walls are lifted and the sun blazes through the high, arched windows above the congregation. We side-step along a pew to take up our place towards the back. The scent of the flowers wafts around the church, finding every crevice, and my heart lifts when we all sing together. On the pew in front of us, pew cushions hang on bronze hooks – there is one that Maman made. She has just finished another one decorated with an image of a lily in white, outlined in yellow thread, a background of deep blue.

The church is full of faces, some familiar, others from neighbouring villages or further afield. In the front pew stands the proud mother, her eyes already glistening with unshed tears as she waits to see her daughter walk down the aisle. Beside her Claudette wears a steel-grey dress and a black wool cloche hat, as if she is attending a funeral.

The bride appears, faltering a little, her hair in a chignon laced with flowers. Then a smile behind her veil as she spots her equally nervous groom, standing waiting, wringing his hands, the small purple flower in his buttonhole already drooping in the heat. He is shorter than Sebastien, squat, broad in the shoulders, a tanned face suggesting that he is probably more at home baling hay than trussed up in his suit. For a moment I daydream of my own groom, the wedding we dreamed we would have. I glance down at Sebastien and almost whisper out loud, ‘One day.’ I think of his father’s last words to me, his plan to get across to England. I haven’t heard anything for weeks, pray he is safe somewhere, squeeze my eyes shut.

We emerge into the day and I take Maman’s arm and squeeze her elbow. She leans her body towards me, head almost resting on mine. I know she wants this for me, that she wants someone to come back and claim me.

We dance into the night in a marquee put up for the occasion; hay bales are scattered around for seating, rugs an attempt to soften the uneven ground. The evening is still and perfect, as if God had planned it all for the newlywed couple. As we step through the canvas, the smells and sounds pervade every pore. A local band are stamping their feet and playing old folk songs, while spinning girls and laughing children are squealing and scampering. Waiting girls tap their feet longingly, sitting perched like birds, heads darting one side to the other in search of a partner, looking longingly at a friend when an elusive hand is proffered.

Cider is being drunk, glasses overflowing from a barrel, so sickly sweet that it makes my head spin after the first few sips. Old men savour a last cigar; nearby, an enormous roasting pig rotates on a spit over the flames, its mouth wide open, screaming its last as it turns slowly, slowly, exuding the most delicious smells, its skin darkening at every turn. Tables are piled high with offerings from the women in the village, ration tickets pooled, other favours called in:
clafoutis
, bowls of lush peaches, meringues and every variety of cheese that this part of France can offer. I see Tristan, one of my most mischievous pupils, reaching up to stick his finger in the middle of the brie, earning himself a scolding from his mother. I hide a laugh in my hand as he catches my eye over her shoulder.

The portly Monsieur Lefèvre, slumped in a corner, sinks lower and lower as I watch, until his body is almost flat on the ground, head crooked awkwardly at an angle. His wife steps over him to get some more dessert. Beyond them I catch the newly-weds in a quiet embrace, oblivious to jostling male friends making lewd jokes about things they know nothing about. They look at the groom in admiration and bewilderment: he has taken those first, tentative steps.

I feel removed from them all, carrying my own secrets.

Everyone glows in the evening light and the noise of talk and laughter and music merges so that I think that this is what happiness sounds like. I am exhausted, slouched on a hay bale, my son in my arms as I watch his grandmother move cautiously around the dance floor, one hand stiffly resting on the shoulder of Papa as he steers her around in the throng. Sebastien and I watch from our perch. He gurgles and my heart fills with love for him. I can feel his little frame, so small; he smiles and stretches his arms up as if dancing to the music. Papa comes over to take him home, takes him from me so carefully, kisses the top of my head.

Maman and I walk back down the high street. The moon is barely out tonight, muffled by cloud, and we stumble, giggling a little childishly, both full of cider and the mood of the evening.

‘Maman,’ I say, stopping in the street and looking at her. ‘Sebastien’s father is a Jew.’

I can see her confusion moving from one moment to the next, and then she repeats the words so slowly and quietly: ‘A Jew.’

We walk in silence for a few minutes.

‘He bought a tomato,’ she announces.

I frown. ‘Maman?’And then I remember the time he came to our shop, my surprise at seeing him there.

‘Where is he now?’

‘England.’

She nods.

‘He doesn’t know about the baby, Maman. I never told him. I couldn’t – I knew he would have stayed and …’ She turns the key in the lock and lowers her voice. ‘How many people know?’

‘No one. I know what it can be like,’ I say quietly.

She opens her mouth as if she is going to add something else but then pushes the door and steps inside.

Papa is in the kitchen, a tisane warming his hands. He looks at us both as we step into the little room. ‘Isabelle?’ ‘I told Maman.’ ‘You knew?’ she asks him in surprise, looking back at me, hurt. ‘I met him, Adeline. He is a good boy.’

‘You
met
him? Why did I not meet him?’ Her voice rises.

The anger at our apparent collusion is obvious, her eyes filled with questions, the hurt of feeling left out. I can hear the words as if she has spoken them out loud. Do we not care that her son, my brother, is in prison, that having any kind of association like that might threaten his safe return? How many months have we hidden this from her?

‘It wasn’t like that,’ Papa insists, moving across to her.

I don’t know why I ruined things. Why I needed to say anything. She had stopped asking months ago. Yet tonight I’d wanted to tell her.

I feel my throat tighten as Maman stands there, looking so lost.

Sebastien starts screaming in his room above us and I hurry from the kitchen, leaving them both there.

Papa’s voice, from the stairs, makes my eyes close. ‘Darling. Adeline.’

‘How dare you,’ she breathes.

I lose his voice halfway through a sentence: ‘We didn’t want to worry you. But I regret it, I should have sa—’ and then I am shushing my baby, lifting him out of his cot, feeling his warm, soft cheek damp with his tears – or mine – as I rock and shush and try to ignore the voices under the floorboards: angry, snapping, as they wash around us, our making.

The anger doesn’t fade and Maman stamps about the shop the next morning, jaw fixed, short with the customers, refusing to acknowledge me or Papa, leaving the kitchen before we eat breakfast so we are not all in the same room together. She doesn’t look in on Sebastien either.

I sit behind the counter of the shop, shoulders slumped as she heaves and puffs in the storeroom in the back. But then a voice, a voice from the very depths of my mind, pipes up: ‘What is there to be so serious about?’

And there, in the doorway, is Paul – our Paul. He stands in the entrance to the shop, his large frame blocking out the light as he towers there, dressed in dirty uniform, his face tired but a smile on his lips.

The storeroom falls silent and I feel my mother’s presence in the shop. She is standing wordlessly in the doorway at the back, a bag of flour hanging forgotten in her hand as she stares at him from across the shop. The bag falls and before I can react she has walked across the floor to him, her hand reaching up to touch his face, then throwing herself into his arms that have flung out wide.

My stool scrapes back as I move to join them and, as I do, Sebastien can be heard crying upstairs.

Paul draws back. ‘What is that?’

He looks towards the stairs leading up to the flat and at that moment I catch my mother’s eye, a bubble bursts, and we both start to laugh.

SEBASTIEN

It is the porcelain figures standing resolutely in the window of a shop on the corner of my street in London that conjure up my mother’s face: her hair drawn back in a low bun, a sliver of silk scarf around her throat, her eyes looking at my father as she dusts around the pieces in the display cabinet. She would hate the fact that no one will have dusted them. I imagine them now, standing in the shadows of the apartment; the shutters, no doubt left open in my haste, a thin line of sunlight highlighting the thin film of dust on their cocked arms, their fragile heads, as they wait for her to return.

I dream of them.

The dust has piled, layer upon layer on their delicate china forms so that they are drowning in it; particles in the air, heaped at their feet like a churned-up battleground … still they wait patiently, rigid, hopeful. The dust keeps coming, they are buried now, one delicate wrist protruding from the pile, the tips of the fingers manicured, the elegant arch of the hand pointing skyward until it, too, is lost underneath the dust that keeps coming.

I wake, snatching at the covers, looking around unseeing in the darkness, remembering France, Spain, London. Lying down again, I focus on my family, Isabelle, feel panic that I can’t see their faces clearly any more – just lines and colours, parts of photographs, no distinct features, just a patchwork quilt that makes up something ugly. Their reality is slipping and now I can feel tears blurring their faces, melting them before me so that they lose their form completely, and become part of the rain, and then I am asleep again.

My arrival in England had seemed impossible for a time. There were months of travelling, waiting, sleeping nights in outhouses, barns – one awful week in the hold of a ship, arranged by a contact of my father in Spain, praying every moment it wouldn’t be torpedoed. Bedraggled, confused, I was even more lost when I finally made it, realized there were no signs to anywhere and no one in the country spoke my language.

It seems to rain non-stop so my clothes never quite dry, and have taken on the smell of London permanently: smoke and the press of bodies mingled with the musty smell of soggy cotton. In parts of the city the streets are a warren, narrow and never-ending, and the buzz of so many people in one place is more than I could ever have imagined. They emerge like ants, shoring up their colony.

I followed Father’s instructions, and stayed with a family he knew in North London for a few days, eating most of their larder in that time. They were leaving for the country, somewhere in the west, and wanted me to join them. But I needed to stay, was restless to feel useful, to be close to where I could get information. I looked around for another arrangement, a flat share. They left me, kisses on both cheeks, a shake of the hand; I promised them I would let them know when there was news.

I push the door to the flat closed, snapping off my little torch on entering the well-lit living room. Edward is hunched in front of the fire, a dusty bottle of red wine half-finished beside him. He looks up as I shake the rain from my coat in the doorway. ‘Sit down, my friend, sit down.’ He struggles with the s’s a little.

Cab Calloway is singing in the background. Edward fell in love with his music after seeing
Stormy Weather
at the pictures with a girl he was sweet on. I can’t decide whether it’s the jazz or the girl that has him drumming his fingers on the armrest of his chair, a sleepy look to his eyes. The newspaper is open beside him. He has a melancholic habit of reading the lists of men who have died or who are missing when the jazz singers play on the turntable.

He holds the bottle out to me and in stilted French asks if I want a glass. In fact, the line he slurs roughly translates as: ‘Glass, drink, me,’ and I can’t help but grin at him before accepting it, making a silent toast to him. I don’t ask where he got it from, this rare treat.

The grey bags under his eyes seem more pronounced in the light from the flames, showing up the thick lines underneath. He is a special constable in the city, a fire warden, while all his spare time is spent furiously cramming revision for his medical exams. Edward Taylor is a wiry chap, all limbs and angles, who’d been turned down in 1940 on account of his terrible eyesight. A pair of glasses, one lens nearly as thick as my little finger, is testament to his affliction. When he doesn’t have them to hand he screws up his eyes and holds his arms out, patting nearby tables for them, his thighs must be spattered with bruises from his various clashes with furniture.

He, too, understands what it’s like to be largely impotent in a war.

I pull up the card table in front of the fire and we start to play a convoluted version of gin rummy. He taught me the rules, slowly and patiently, but I still stare stupidly at the collection of diamonds in my hand. We don’t talk – we already know each other’s sorry stories after swapping them in both broken languages after getting wonderfully drunk the evening I moved in. Edward now knows every detail of my life so far, and nearly every detail of my romance with Isabelle. That is the effect of a bottle of brandy.

Sirens wail. We stagger down flights of stairs to the cellar, pushing open the door to see our neighbours already sitting in huddles on flattened cushions. Light comes from lamps on occasional tables. It’s a strangely comfortable scene, only marred by the woman on the ground floor: a mother of four, whose face is always pale despite the warm glow of the room; her children sleep, oblivious, around her. One man is eating a late dinner off a plate on his lap, joking with Edward in a quiet undertone. My stomach rumbles, the reconstituted eggs and powdered milk I had for dinner in no way adequate.

We carry on playing gin rummy, frozen like deer in the moment when the floor vibrates – something a little too close for comfort, no one wanting to be trapped here. I focus on my hands as I start to feel the room close around me, the shadows on the walls dancing. Picking at a nail I breathe out slowly; Edward catches my eye, understands, gives me a weak smile. We rest against the walls, shut our eyes.

Father’s burble of a laugh, tickled by something I’ve said; Mother’s easy presence, her piano pieces fluttering around the apartment like they are tripping on a breeze, and then … Isabelle. A halo of sunshine around golden hair, green eyes that flash in my dreams, waking me with a start like she’s been watching me sleep.

In the morning, we stumble out and survey the streets around us, staring at the blown-out upper half of a nearby house, bed and belongings dripping out of the exposed wall, spewing its contents into the street below: the bath, balanced precariously at a slant, tiles, bricks, books, china, fragments. Two figures standing wordlessly hand in hand staring at it, the woman’s neat grey curls under a burgundy felt hat, the man in a large overcoat, as if they are about to take their daily constitutional.

There is no word. Jean-Paul and I are in regular correspondence – without his wires of money I would have never made it this far – but he has heard nothing from my parents. The local
gendarmes
are being wholly unhelpful, and a lot of their mutual friends either can’t help or refuse to do so. Never once in the letters do either of us hint at the reasons behind the silence, neither of us ready to admit the rumours we have heard. I beg Jean-Paul to keep up the search, desperately guilty not to be back in France helping him.

‘I am so pleased you got out,’ he often repeats. ‘And your parents would be too.’

He continues to run the bank in both mine and Father’s absence, for us to return to after the war. I cling to his optimism: I devour newspapers for news of them, not knowing how much of what I am reading is simply propaganda served up by the Allies, but shocked anyway by the talk of camps, of men, women and children being shot, sent away.

How can everyone stand by? Is it really all true?

I try to picture my mother in these appalling circumstances but can never fully convince myself that the delicate woman who loves her figurines, delicately embroidered patterns, the pianoforte, can have found her way to one of these places. Nor can I conceive of my father being treated as some faceless nobody; I see him grumbling about the heat on a summer’s day, noticing a speck of dust on his coat and removing it with a quick flick of his wrist. Any fool can see that my parents are simple, pleasant, well-mannered people.

I hold on to this hope as I continue to enquire. I write dozens of letters, haunt the gates of various embassies, read every newspaper, beg Edward to make his parents use their contacts, their friends’ contacts. No one has heard anything.

It’s as if nothing extraordinary has happened at all.

Edward helps me find work with an ambulance crew. I learn how to check the tyres, battery and radiator, how to keep the levels topped up before every outing. They need help, physical strength, and I feel useful, enjoying the ache in my limbs at the end of a day as I weave back through the darkening streets of London, in amongst the bustle of other commuters, or uniformed men and women on leave, hastening to whichever social event might drown out their war-weary thoughts for a moment.

For me, in my head, I am stuck in France. I see Isabelle everywhere;  in every laugh, a glimpse of blue dress, a red suede shoe, blonde hair. It is never her – a flash of her, but always smaller and disappointing: the shoes belong to a stout brunette, the laugh jars, the blonde hair is too short. For a second though, a second of possibility, I ache for it to really be her. I crave her reassuring gaze, steady on my face; to see myself as she sees me, somebody strong. I try to conjure up the feel of her touch on my arms, the small of my back; I try to recall her laugh captured in a glove, a sputter. The ghost of her kisses remain on my cheeks and, as I wipe my face in the mirror, I imagine I am wiping them away. I am scared that we will stay apart for years and I realize that, in many ways, I need the agony, need the sharp jolt when I realize it is not her, because then I’m reminded what I feel is real and if she feels a fraction of it, she will wait for me.

I write letters to her in a neat scrawl, fold them up carefully, buy envelopes for them. They speak of nothing and everything: the smeared grin of a toddler on a bus; the sound of the anti-aircraft guns over the city at night; the sky, almost free from stars above my head; my introduction to whale meat. My parents. The war. Then a series of questions enquiring as to the minutiae of her day, her life, questions so humdrum that they force me there, across the Channel, back in front of her, listening to the details firsthand.

Every time a letter arrives in barely legible, slanting blue ink – she has always had terrible handwriting, she admits – I feel I am at home again in my bedroom in Limoges, my mother downstairs singing a little aria as she plays, Father reading in his favourite chair. I sit, head resting against the whitewashed wall of the single bedroom, a threadbare rug, scrubbed-pine chest of drawers, washbowl and faded photograph of Westminster Bridge the only accessories to the blank space, and close my eyes.