When the Sky Fell Apart (17 page)

It was about that time that Dr Carter took an interest in Marthe. Scrawled down some notes. Asked her to move her arm, hold his pen, touch her nose, recite
she sells seas shells.

Marthe moaned and flailed her arms; Carter scribbled away, shook his head, frowned. He did this every day for weeks, not a word to Edith about it—just kept writing.

The next Edith knew, he was waiting on her doorstep first thing in the morning.

‘I do apologise, I simply—I wondered if you might allow me to examine Marthe?'

She blinked then smiled. ‘Well, of course, if you can help her. Come in.'

‘I'm unsure if I will be able to
help
exactly, but I've become intrigued recently by the idea of incurable cases—I've been studying my medical textbooks, you see, for a patient who has a…difficult condition. It made me wonder: you helped Clement Hacquoil to recover, and you seem to be doing a marvelous job with Marthe. I'm fascinated. Call it medical curiosity.'

His smile looked nervous. Edith nodded.

‘Go on and please yourself, by all means. I'll be making some coffee. Parsnip today, I'm afraid.'

She went into the kitchen. As she boiled the burnt parsnip peelings and stirred the viscous, black liquid, she wondered again how Carter had managed to escape deportation. There were rumours, of course, that he was cosying up to the Germans, but she couldn't bring herself to believe them. Carter seemed so kind and he was so outraged by the Germans' cruelty. She remembered his touching naïveté, the way he'd called the Commandant
brutal
and
inhuman
in his carelessness with Clement's life, and she knew, without any doubt, that there must be some other explanation.

She watched him now, from the doorway, talking softly to Marthe, asking questions of her, looking for any response and then jotting notes in that little pad of his.

In the end, she said, ‘Reporting back to someone, are you, Doctor?'

He started. ‘Forgive me. I must seem terribly rude, ignoring you. It's simply that I find her fascinating.'

‘Tragic through and through is what she is.'

‘What I mean is, I examined her when I first arrived on the island. Her husband brought her because she had begun to exhibit the chorea so classic in Huntington's cases—'

‘It's what?'

‘Her disease. Huntington's Chorea. Juvenile onset, I would say, from her age and the rapid decline. What did you imagine was wrong with her?'

‘Hadn't a clue, Doctor. I thought she was going mad, poor love. Like her mother before her.'

‘Ah, it's more usually passed down from the father.'

‘They say madness runs in families, don't they? There's plenty whisper her family has been cursed. I don't put much stock in that rubbish, but her mother died very young. Beautiful, she was, just like Marthe.'

Carter sighed. ‘It's not madness. Huntington's is a degenerative disease, which strikes the brain.'

Edith felt a surge of excitement. ‘If you know what she has then you can cure her!'

Carter shook his head. ‘Sadly, no. It's incurable,' he said, quite softly, and with a hand on her arm. ‘She'll die, Edith. Like her mother. I'm so sorry.'

She had known it, of course. Seen her mother go. Folk said the same had happened to her grandmother too. But nothing like hearing the words to bring things home. A crushing sensation in Edith's chest and, before she could stop herself, she was sobbing on Carter's smart jacket with the leather elbow patches.

She was not usually given to tears. She took deep breaths, but they kept on coming. She concentrated on the rough wool and thought about how it smelt of sheep's urine when it was damp, which was why she never wore wool from Scotland, and she stopped crying quickly enough.

‘Thank you,' she sniffed. ‘You're a good man. A
kind
man.'

‘If there's anything I can do. Anything at all…'

Carter patted her arm, turned to go and then stopped, suddenly.

‘It occurs to me… If you're really determined to help her, then there are various lifestyle changes that may have a positive impact in terms of slowing the progression of the disease or improving her quality of life. But'—he smiled sadly—‘I wouldn't advise you to give Maurice false hope.'

She understood. ‘So, what must I do?'

Edith memorised Carter's every word: sunlight; lots of meat and fish; exercise every day, even if only helping her try to walk a few paces around the garden; plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables and lots of sleep and rest.

Simple enough. Except that the bloody greedy Germans had already eaten most of the stock of fresh meat and vegetables, which would have lasted the island the whole winter any other year. Edith would have to be clever about finding some extras. Good thing Clement was in her debt—extra meat was near on impossible to find. All the more reason to work on those scars and put him back behind the butcher's block as soon as possible.

HER soldier's name was Gregor.

Claudine walked past the bomb shelter every morning before school and every afternoon on her way home, and he was nearly always there, waiting. Except for when he had to do some important soldier work, guarding all the Russian and Italian
Häftlinge
. They were prisoners because they had done bad things to the German army in other countries. They were dangerous men, but the Germans kept them under control.

‘Aren't you frightened of them, Gregor?'

‘
Nein.
These are animals. Just broken animals.'

He seemed sad and he rubbed at the skin on his crooked arm, as he often did when he was troubled. Looking at the arm had upset Claudine at first, but she hardly noticed it now. He could still loop a bucket handle over the shiny stump and could use the bunched-up fingers to grip part of a spade and…it was simply part of him, like his thin face or his blue eyes or his quick smile.

‘Shall we go into the sea? I can teach you to swim.'

Claudine wasn't horribly hungry like she had been after the Germans first arrived and gobbled all the food. There still wasn't much food, but Gregor often brought her presents, like pieces of meat, which no one else had very much of anymore.

Her eleventh birthday had been and gone. They had a little extra meat and Maman had wrapped an old dress of hers as a present. It was too long and Claudine kept tripping over the hem, but she laughed and they all skipped around the living room to stay warm.

Gregor had given her some extra meat for her birthday, too. Perhaps he had stolen it. She was too hungry to ask and ate it, greedily.

When Gregor couldn't find any meat, they tried to catch fish from the end of the pier—Gregor was allowed to fish because soldiers could do anything they pleased. Claudine sat far enough away from him that it wouldn't look odd if another soldier were to see them.

From three arms' lengths away, while looking out at the flat expanse of the sea, she taught him to fish:
Take a scrap of stale bread
.
Spit on it a little, like so, and mash it up with your finger, and then squash it into a hard ball on the end of your fishing line. Then when a big fish nibbles it, the hook will stick fast in his cheek.

Sometimes, if no one was on the beach, they found a little ledge where both of them could sit side by side with their feet dangling just above the water. Their reflection could have been a sepia photograph from years before, the sort of thing tourists would have bought and sent home on a postcard as a memento of the idyllic island:
young girl fishing with her older brother.

Once, Gregor caught a bass, laughed and shouted.

Claudine seized it and gave it a quick bash on the head with a sharp stone, just as Papa had shown her when he used to take her fishing when she was very little. Fish blood and brains spattered onto her hand and across her cheek.

She held the fish up to show Gregor. Silver scales glinting in the pale sunlight. She thought he would be happy, but his face was blank.

She asked if he wanted to hold it, to feel how heavy it was.

‘It's
enormous
, Gregor, look!'

But he stepped backwards, his face twisted in revulsion. He was very quiet for a long time after that.

Sometimes Gregor was busy elsewhere with his soldier duties, so Claudine sat in the cold sand in the den and pretended to find monsters in the clouds. Or she climbed up on top of La Rocque pier. A long way away, she could see the soldiers marching. Like beetles, making dark grey shapes on the clean sand. Building, they were always building. Turning the island grey, shaping it into a fortress, bristling with weapons for the Germans to use. Within Claudine's gut was a frozen sort of sadness, like slowly melting ice. Or perhaps that was hunger.

On those days, Maman said, ‘Where have you been, out until this hour? It's nearly curfew. I was worried sick.'

‘Sorry. I was trying to catch another bass.'

‘Silly goose. We'll just stretch out what we have. With the potatoes we've enough here for the three of us.'

Often that wasn't true, but Claudine didn't call her a liar, even when they all went to bed with insides that felt like they'd been scooped out with a jagged spoon.

The family huddled around the illegal wireless late at night, all tucked under one blanket to hear the BBC News broadcast. It was mostly names of strange places: Bardia, Tobruk, Eritrea. And something called the Blitz, which the newsreader described in a sombre voice—which meant, to Claudine's horror, that the Germans were killing people in England with bombs. She shuddered, reminded of the sour-sweet stench of Clement Hacquoil as he burned on the beach.

Still no news from Papa. Once a week, Claudine walked with Maman to the post office to see if he had sent a message to them through the Red Cross. Every week, Maman said, ‘He must have forgotten us.'

The first time she said it, Claudine cried. But after months and months with no word, she started to say it too. Then she started to hope that it was true, because if he had forgotten them, it meant he was still alive.

On the beach with Gregor, she tried to forget the war and play games or tell stories. But the war seeped into everything, like the salt from the sea, like the gossip from people's mouths. War changed the colour and texture of everything, even the games of children.

Gregor was often quiet or sad and didn't seem to want to join in when she made up stories about people fighting battles or running and hiding from bombs.

Once, she asked him, ‘Why are you here? In Jersey?'

‘We are making a good world for all people.'

‘But what about the people who are hurt? In London, people are dying. And in Germany too. I heard it on the news.'

He turned to her, his expression wretched. ‘You should not have radio. Do not talk of this. It can bring trouble.'

She felt a small stab of the terror that had first engulfed her upon meeting him: a German soldier, with his gun. But then she blinked and he was Gregor again. Kind Gregor who gave her toys and shared his food with her, even though doing those things might get him into trouble.

‘Is it rotten being a German soldier?'

‘Sometimes,
liebchen
.' He kissed the top of her head, and then he stared out at the sea.

Claudine looked at the sharp planes of his German face, made sharper by hunger. Neither of them said anything. She noticed that the skin on his poor arm was redder than usual, and a little swollen. He had bruises on his neck and face: one made a scribbled circle around his eye. Smudges of blood under his skin: brown and yellowish. Old.

She took a breath to ask him:
What happened to your face?
But then she remembered how she used to feel a hot, sickening shame if anyone at school was nosy about the bruises she sometimes had on her legs and back, after Maman had been having one of her black weeks. So she simply sat with him, reached out, took his ruined stump of a hand. They watched the shifting, rumpled surface of the sea, wrinkling under the fingers of the wind.

When he was happy, Gregor taught Claudine German, which was very helpful at school. Soon she was the best in the class.

But the other children, faces twisted with spite, started calling her a
Jerry-Bag
, which was a nasty name for a Jèrriais woman who had a German boyfriend, or sometimes lots of German boyfriends. Another word for
traitor
.

Claudine tried not to mind, when they shouted it, but the words cut deep, the sharp voices, the spiked anger.
Jerry-Bag! Jerry-Bag!

She called them
Dreksau
, and then hid behind the big oak tree in the schoolyard so that no one would see her tears.

She tried to explain. ‘Gregor isn't like a
proper
soldier; he's kind—he's a good sort. I hate the Germans too, but Gregor isn't
completely
German. Not
absolutely
.'

But the children just laughed and shouted,
Jerry-Bag! Jerry-Bag!