The Silent Hours (22 page)

ADELINE

1952, St Cecilia nunnery, south-west France

I scribble frantically now, sitting on a chair by the greenhouse as the nuns bend and sow various seeds. The memories are bursting out and I can barely keep up as I scrawl the words. I am remembering that delicious feeling: my son returned. Never had the house been happier.

He talks in garbled language to his nephew, bouncing him on his knee and chattering on as if he can understand him.

Resting in Vincent’s armchair, his eyes closed, two lines furrowed in his brow, reliving memories in his sleep.

He starts and wakes. A shout. He snaps at Isabelle, makes her drop her glass. His eyes are elsewhere: not with us. They are a deeper shade of green.

He is in his pyjamas jabbering about the drone of aircraft overhead but there is nothing but crickets to be heard in the still air of the sleeping high street.

My hand, palm flat, on a wall, the bricks cold under my hand. I am listening. Paul and Vincent are talking about the factory, about where Paul was held.

My eyes on the ceiling, pulling the blanket up under my chin. Paul is home with us at last.

Paul at the sink, staring at the chickens out of the window. My tisane is cold but I can’t look away. Still amazed he is standing, real, in the kitchen. He looks older than the boy that left, much older. His cheekbones are more prominent, he has unfamiliar, muscular arms. He turns around and there is a new expression on his face. He asks something and my response makes him laugh. His laugh, his low, gravelly laugh, that so echoes Vincent’s, is him, and I relax back into my chair.

Paul leaving the shop, kissing me on the cheek and gently pinching Sebastien’s nose to make him gurgle. He passes the window, a man with purpose, a renewed energy in his stride, his chin up. Off to see a man from Paris who is rumoured to be hiring. He greets the barrelled, humourless Monsieur Lefèvre with a tip of his hat, turns back to make a face at me through the shop window. I let out a laugh in the empty room.

I remember feeling blessed, that we deserved it; we deserved to have him back.

ISABELLE

Paul has returned to us. I still catch myself in the mornings, surprised to see him bustling into the kitchen, holding his arms out for his nephew. He is slowly returning to us piece by piece: his laugh has returned, slow at first, as if it were unsure. His face creases in new ways now.

We take Sebastien down to the river, talk about life before the war and what Sebastien’s childhood will be like in the village that seems in so many ways to be unchanged. He is incredibly gentle with him, holding him to himself like he is the most fragile thing on this earth, dropping kisses on his wispy hair without thought. He doesn’t sleep well and when I am feeding Sebastien he will lie quietly at the foot of the bed, staring at the ceiling as we talk into the early hours.

I’m so thankful he is back but sometimes … I feel it is as if I’ve bargained one for the other – like I can’t have them both. Too much happiness.

Sebastien. What do I miss about him? The feeling I get when he looks at me, that plunge in my insides like I’ve just swallowed something heavy that makes me full so that I don’t want food. The sound of his low laugh, bubbling up, unashamed, the way he nods in quiet agreement when I’m telling a story. The feeling of his hand as it takes mine.

The missing gets worse, and some days I want to write and tell him, tell him about his son, tell him we will find a way, that it is safe, that he should come back. His son is sitting, turning over. He looks like him: the same dark hair, guileless expression. I write half-letters, abandon them in the middle of words, rub them out, go over them again. Then, when I realize I can’t explain, ball them up and push them into the fire so that I’m not tempted to start them again.

And the fear, gnawing, fear that we will never have those days again, that it is lost to the war, that I will grow old, lined, and he will still be gone. That he will miss these things, that I will stop noticing, that the war will have killed it, if not us.

That the absence will be all that I’ll ever know.

TRISTAN

Papa is more relaxed these days – kissing Mother on the head after mealtimes, which I think means he is happy. He said something about the place being safe but I think it has always been safe, as in Paris there were a lot more dangers, like cars.

I look for André in our corner of the schoolyard. He towers over everyone else and his hair looks like one of Clarisse’s mops but he’s notheretoday. André is my bestfriend now. Hehasmovedtothe desk next to me. He used to sit with Samuel but since Samuel left he sits there. He is brilliant at throwing and catching and has taught me and Dimitri how to fish. He has only really been my best friend for a few weeks and Michel is now my second best friend. André’s been in the village since the start of the war but he came from a place in the east, near the border, and his family fled the Hun and his dad has been sent away somewhere in the north. He likes our house because the garden is huge. Also we can stand and press our faces up against the gate and watch as the tram passes down below. When we press our faces into the railings our cheeks sort of buzz and hum against the metal when it goes past.

I want to tell him about the strange dream I had last night about giant pigeons. André knows all sorts of funny things about the war and he was telling me that the Allies use carrier pigeons when they advance on enemy lines and then send all the details back in little pouches tied to their legs. He told me that the pigeons can fly to England, or other places far away, with all this information and the Nazis can’t stop them because pigeons are so small so most of the aircraft can’t hit them. He says some of them have been awarded medals for bravery. That made Papa laugh and ruffle my hair. It sounds so clever to me, and now I am going to look out for pigeons flying over the village, as you never know – they might be carrying secret information about the enemy that will end this war.

André told me that earlier in the war some men in Germany tried to kill Adolf Hitler by blowing him up but they didn’t succeed and when I asked what happened to them André said he didn’t know. I imagine, much like the pigeons, Hitler would want to shoot them down too. I think about the spies in the forest then. Everything seems all right since we told Papa about the spies so I think we helped. I think the war will probably end soon, what with the spies being caught, and all the pigeons.

It has been so cold this winter and it has dragged on and on. I swear I have icicles hanging from my nose when we are in school. My knees are practically blue with cold by lunch and I pull up my socks to try and keep out the worst of it. My writing has got all squiggly as my hands are so numb. Most of the teachers tend to leave us to it in the cobbled yard we have to run around in at break. There is a stone wall at one end and André and I invented another game the other day, to try and stop from freezing, but it is already banned because stupid Hugues nearly broke his nose. The rule is you have to close your eyes and run at the wall and then stop when you think you are just about to hit it. The closest to the wall wins. But of course Hugues went and ran into the wall and got a nosebleed and his mother yelled at him in front of everyone as she had to leave the hotel where she worked to come and take him home.

Today, however, I’m too cold to play ball games and André isn’t here. He had a sore throat yesterday so he is probably at home, his mother bringing him warm soup. I suddenly wish I had been taken ill. I scuff my shoe on the ground and wait for the bell so I can go back inside. I blow out, my breath making a little puff of smoke in front of me, like the clouds of smoke that hang around the tables in the café opposite, from the men’s pipes. I amuse myself for a few moments pretending I too am smoking and enjoy making the little swirls in the air.

‘Very impressive.’ Mademoiselle Rochard laughs.

I jump and blush a little when I realize who it is. I don’t normally talk to her at break times and now she’s caught me doing something so silly, but her face is kind. She looks a little different, not how I think of her in my head. She still has her long blonde hair, although she has it in a big plait thing around her head. Her cheeks are pink from the cold. She rubs her hands together; she is wearing leather gloves, a faded red colour, they look soft. She hasn’t been my teacher for ages. She teaches the younger ones now, but since the bump went away and the baby came she doesn’t come into school every day.

‘You look older,’ she says.

I don’t know what to say.

‘You too.’

She laughs.

‘How are your family getting on?’

‘Very well, thank you.’

‘Your mother visits our shop and talks about you all.’ She waves in the direction of the high street. I wonder what Mother talks about and hopes she puts me in a good light. ‘I’m sorry if I seem nosey … A bad habit.’ She laughs again.

I smile at her – you sort of can’t help it, she has one of those faces. It is at that moment that a bird flies over and I watch it carefully, wondering if it is a pigeon – it’s about the right size. And suddenly I am telling her all about what André had told me and she laughs too, the way Papa had.

‘England, really?’ she says. ‘How wonderful.’

‘Some have won medals for bravery,’ I add.

The bell goes for the next lesson.

‘I wouldn’t mind being able to fly to England,’ she says, as I turn to go inside. She watches the pigeon fly right overhead and away.

My heart sinks, but I don’t tell her that I was wrong: it is a blackbird. Blackbirds don’t fly anywhere with little messages on their feet for spying, or win medals. In fact, I think they mostly go in pies.

SEBASTIEN

Some weeks I hear nothing from her. I try to blame the war, the delays, the censor, the unpredictable crossings, but when the letters arrive, I find I don’t know how to read them, filling in the silences, what isn’t said, with worry. I can’t pinpoint what it is at times – she seems to be holding something back, not wanting to disappoint me, perhaps? A cold grips my heart.

I imagine her head has been turned by another man; I lie on my bed trying to picture her with someone else. He is tall and faceless and she is laughing up at him, touching his arm, tickled by a joke. He draws her to him, one hand on her neck, covering the round mole, feeling her soft skin. I sometimes wonder whether I will send myself mad with these imaginings; I hate myself for my lack of faith in her. She tells me her heart is mine and she is waiting for my return, fervently hoping it will be soon. She signs off two letters in this way; it twists my gut.

I see myself growing old as this war rages on, a lost, rambling soul in a foreign country, utterly alone. I try not to dwell on these thoughts often but it strikes me, standing at a bus stop, or catching sight of a hat my mother might have worn, a man of my father’s stature, a blonde girl. Everyone is moving forward and I am stuck in a dank country with nothing and nobody to call my own.

Huddled under a thin blanket staring out at stubborn rain that appears to have settled in, unending and persistent, I try to think myself out of this mood. Edward is at the hospital, has been all night, will appear soon, eyes red-rimmed, heading straight to bed. A half-finished book rests by my side: he keeps lending me crime novels. This one is set in Egypt but I lost the story pages back.

I drag myself out of bed to boil the milk, something we do daily to stop it going sour, and stare listlessly out of the scratched pane of glass above the kitchen sink: grey skies, the rooftops of the houses opposite, a tiny glimpse of the barrage balloons hovering in the low rain clouds over London.

I have exhausted all sources for my parents, have stood in lines with a hundred other immigrants, and have written endless letters to a dozen or so relatives and friends. Some have replied, and all have been polite but hopeless.

Until today. A letter arrives, news Jean-Paul announces in the first sentence. I walk unseeing to the sitting room, lower myself into the chair by the fire, the page a smudge of letters as I want to read on, don’t want to read on. I get up, leave the letter open on the side-table, move to the door of the kitchen, look back, his writing a meaningless scrawl from here. I consider leaving the flat, running down the stairs, bursting out into the street and walking away, not looking back.

He has news.

Slowly, my feet return me to the spot by the fire; I stay standing, pick up the letter. It is shaking in my hand as I reread the first sentence. Then the words come, the words I knew would come, didn’t know would come, didn’t want to know.

My parents were taken by members of the local
gendarmerie
, and some members of the
Milice
, that night. They were arrested after a tip-off from an unnamed source. Someone had accused the bank of funding resistance efforts. Jean-Paul says the claims are false. He urges me to remain hopeful. The track has gone cold at Drancy, where they were sent.

The track has gone cold, he is still looking. Will keep looking.

I see a man in a café. I see a pencil-thin moustache. Then the kind faces of my parents.

I blink once, the letter creasing as my hand tightens on it. I look listlessly about the grim little room, the sparse colourless furniture, someone else’s possessions, and know I have another day stretching ahead.

ISABELLE

My darling,

I am so desperately sorry for you. I have never wanted to be in England with you more than when I heard your news. It is cruel that we are apart and that I can’t hold you, cling on so tight to you so that you can’t possibly feel alone. We will be together again: you must hold on to that one true thought.

When this war is over, people will have to answer for the horrific things they have done, but you are right to be sad, not angry. We will find them, remain hopeful. Your parents love you fervently and are the most generous people. They wantyou to be safe and they would be so heartened to know where you are now, thatyou will get through this awful war even if it has meant being apart from them.

The seasons are changing, the air is warmer, the wind no longer carryingthat sting that makes your cheeks red and your ears ache with the cold. This warwill be over soon, everyone is saying so, it is not far away now. The moment it is, we will be together again. There are so many new memories we can make and you must look forward, to the horizon, because it will come. You must never give up on that, you must never give up on me. I am waiting for you, I will spend the rest of my days with you. Hold that tight to your chest at night, feel the warmth of that thought blocking out all the ugliness and the cold and dark.

Don’t give up now Sebastien, when we are so close.

I love you,

Isabelle