Resistance (12 page)

Before they set out up the hill once more, Sarah went upstairs. “Now, don’t you laugh,” she said as Maggie heard her tread coming down the staircase again.

“Good God, girl! What you thinking of?” Maggie said as Sarah entered the kitchen. She was wearing a pair of Tom’s trousers puckered under a thick belt at her waist. One of his corduroy jackets hung loosely from her shoulders, its sleeves rolled thickly at her wrists.

“They still smell of him,” she explained to Maggie, who was staring at her as if she’d come down the stairs naked. “The dogs’ll pick it up, won’t they? It might help.”

“Well, it might,” Maggie said, “but looking like that you’ll frighten the bloody sheep away too!” She hit the table with the flat of her hand and laughed. It was the first time Sarah had seen her smile for weeks.

By the end of the day they’d managed to round up all the lambing ewes and bring them down for flushing in the richer pastures by the river. After the coarse grazing of the hillside two weeks on this richer grass would improve their fertility. More ewes would take, and of those that did, there’d be more twins too. God knows, though, Sarah thought, they had too many to deal with anyway. The splitting of The Court’s flock had given all the farms in the valley more sheep than they could handle. If Tom had been here they’d probably have sold a third of these ewes by now. But he wasn’t and they hadn’t, so for now the farm and the sheep would have to cope as best they could. And so would they.

By the time Maggie left Upper Blaen the sun was firing up the sharp edge of the Hatterall again, setting its steep mottled sides a deep black. Sarah stood in the yard for a moment, watching the first stars appear in the blue black sky above the ridge. Once again she was exhausted, the ache in her womb a nagging reminder of that morning’s disappointment, which she still felt despite her more sensible self telling her she should be relieved. But beneath these surface sensations Sarah was also strangely contented. They had brought the sheep down. Over the afternoon the dogs had begun to listen to her, retuning themselves to her pitch and tone. The sheep had begun to flow. The job was done and the ewes would be ready for tupping. Tom would have been proud of her. Just for a moment all this lent her a sense of tired ease and she relished being alone in the yard, watching the stars dot to life against the sky like the first raindrops against a window at the start of a downpour. But even this ease was short-lived. It scared her. She didn’t want to feel any second of contentment while Tom was away. She was frightened
that if she did, one day she’d become too used to this. She needed to miss him at every moment. If she didn’t, then it would already be too late.

She went inside to rekindle the fire in the range and make herself supper. These were often the hardest hours of the day. Preparing for bed alone. Eating alone. She’d begun reading her small selection of books again, finding some company in the familiar stories of Dickens, Hardy, Eliot, and Scott. They were the books of her girlhood, given to her by Mrs. Thomas, an enthusiastic teacher who’d thought she shouldn’t have been leaving school when she did. She hadn’t read them for years, hardly ever since she’d married. But tonight she was too tired even to read. She would eat, write her diary to Tom, clean up the kitchen, and then go to bed, hoping as ever not to dream at all but to fall into a blank sleep instead. A sleep so deep and blind that it would, for a few hours at least, erase the dull ache of the missing body beside her.

Sarah was on her knees sweeping the ash from under the range when she heard footsteps outside followed by a sharp rap on the kitchen door. She looked up, still on her knees, to see it already opening.

“Hello?” she said.

The clear night outside was washed with moonlight. She could make out a figure silhouetted in the door frame. A man’s figure.

“Tom?” she said quietly, leaning forward on the palms of her hands. The figure didn’t move. “Tom?” she said again, louder, her frown unfolding to the tremors of a smile. The figure stepped forward into the kitchen and it was then, by the dim light of a single lantern, that Sarah saw the battered grey green serge of Albrecht’s uniform. She gasped and jumped back onto her heels, sending the rack of iron pokers and tongs beside the fireplace clattering over the flagstones.

“Please,” Albrecht said, slotting his pistol back into its holster and holding out his hand. “Don’t be alarmed, please.”

Sarah tipped herself further away until she felt the iron of the range’s oven, still warm at her back. She held the brush she’d been sweeping with across her chest, its bristles over her heart.

“Please,” Albrecht said again, “I didn’t mean to surprise you.”

Sarah saw movement behind him. A darker shadow shifting in the night. There was someone else there, in the yard. Why were the dogs so quiet? She’d heard them barking but had been too tired to go out and silence them. She’d thought they were just excited from their day’s work out on the hill.

“You are Sarah Lewis?” Albrecht said, looking down at a notepad.

She looked back into the soldier’s face. The candlelight reflected off the lenses of his glasses. Without his eyes she couldn’t read his expression. She nodded, unable to bring enough air into her clenched chest to do anything else.

“Good,” Albrecht said. The word dislodged a rattle in his throat and turning to one side he coughed heavily into his gloved hand. The cough was deep, hoarse. “Excuse me,” he said, turning back to face her. He gestured to one of the chairs around the kitchen table. “Please, sit down.”

His voice surprised her. He spoke an English Sarah had rarely heard. Clean, clear, precise, like the English of the estate owners around Abergavenny, but gentler, more careful. In this last request, however, she’d detected the slightest hint of an order. She didn’t want to press that voice any further, so slowly she stood up and pulled out a chair from under the table. Still moving carefully, she sat in it. Tom’s chair, she thought as she did, the chair her husband sat in every morning for breakfast. The chair from which she missed him every day, its blank seat always a reminder of that morning when she’d woken to the silences and spaces of his going. The thought of Tom brought the air back into her lungs.

“What do you want?” she asked, keeping her shaking hands on her lap.

“My name is Captain Wolfram,” the soldier said slowly. He held his peaked cloth cap in both hands before him, as an altar boy
might carry a candle down the aisle of a church. “I am in command of a patrol unit of the German army. I am here to inform you that myself and my men have established an observation post in your area.” He paused. “I understand you were not aware this area is under German military control?”

Sarah shook her head. The hammering at The Court, it was them. German soldiers, here in the valley. After all Maggie had said. Maggie? She’d been going to check on The Court when she left this evening. Was she all right? Was she alive even?

“No,” she said quietly.

“Well, it is,” Albrecht continued. “I wanted to inform you of our particular presence personally and to reassure you that while we are allowed to complete our work here without obstruction, then we will not disturb you, your belongings, or your families.” He took a step nearer the table and, resting his hands on the back of a chair, leant towards Sarah. “I do not anticipate we will be here for long,” he said in a more relaxed tone, a tiredness tingeing the edges of his voice. “A week, perhaps two.”

Complete our work
. What did he mean by that? Sarah’s mind was racing, suddenly acute, trying to take in this sudden invasion. She looked over the German officer again. His uniform was worn, threadbare at the elbows. He wore a thick black belt about his tunic. The crosshatched stock of his pistol protruded from a heavy leather holster on one side and a long knife hung to halfway down his thigh on the other. No, not a knife, Sarah thought, a bayonet. Again she remembered the stories of the German invasions of Belgium and Holland.

Albrecht moved towards the dresser. “Is your husband at home, Mrs. Lewis?” he said, picking up their wedding photograph.

Sarah blinked rapidly, keeping her eyes fixed on the photograph as if it was her child he held so casually in one hand, not a picture in a cheap wooden frame. Suddenly she saw, felt, the taking of that picture again. A bright May day, standing on the steps of the chapel, her veil flicking into her face in the breeze. The path covered with a confetti of cherry blossom. Laying her hand on Tom’s
sleeve. Feeling the delicate tensing of his forearm under the heavy cloth of his suit.

“No,” she said, trying to stop her voice quavering. “He’s on the hill. We found a ewe with liver fluke. He’s with her now.”

“Liver fluke,” Albrecht said quietly, weighing the term on his tongue. “I see. Well, Mrs. Lewis, if you could tell him of my visit I’d be most grateful.” He put the photograph back on the dresser and gave Sarah a tight smile. For the first time she saw his eyes behind his glasses. He looked exhausted. Older than his voice. She saw too that his short black hair was flecked with grey, like when the river ran shallow over the stones, foaming white in the dark.

Albrecht gave a curt bow of his head. “Good evening, Mrs. Lewis,” he said. “I am sorry for alarming you. I promise it was not intentional.” Stepping out the still-open door, he turned back. “I hope the sheep gets better,” he said, putting on his peaked cap. “And that Mr. Lewis is not away for too long.”

And then he was gone. He hadn’t been in the room for more than two minutes. He hadn’t even asked to search the rest of the house. Another hand closed the door. Sarah heard a few words of German, quick and impenetrable, and then the disjointed chorus of three sets of footsteps fading over the cobblestones and down the track. The dogs gave a couple of barks and once again she heard the shuffle of their chains. Then there was nothing. Just the unending rustle and hush of the river below the house and the wind playing a hollow note in the chimney behind her.

H
e shouldn’t have called after dark. He should have taken the old woman’s word and come back in the morning. But he had to check, that’s what Albrecht told himself as, flanked by Alex and Otto, he picked his way down the track from Upper Blaen. The long frozen puddles running between the peaks and ridges of mud crackled and split under their feet. Yes, he had to be sure. Not a single man in the valley. Because he hadn’t believed any of their stories. They hadn’t even kept to the same one. Farm sales, helping cousins, driving sheep to slaughter. They all seemed to have no idea. Such movement, such events simply weren’t happening anymore.

Otto and Alex walked on either side of him, one slightly ahead, one just behind, swinging their submachine guns in slow arcs as they walked. Albrecht noticed how the moonlight caught the thin barrels, slipping up and down the polished metal as the two men swung them, left and right, right and left. Their anxiety was understandable. However important it had been to check all the buildings in the valley, it was still irregular to be out after dark in new territory. But then everything about this mission had been irregular from the very start. Ever since he’d taken that motorbike over to SS Southern Headquarters over a month ago. An SS order to a Wehrmacht officer. He should have known then that he was going into unknown territory, in every sense of the word.

The meeting with the SS colonel had lasted no more than five minutes, but it had been enough for him to know this was no ordinary patrol. The colonel was evidently as unimpressed with the whole idea as Albrecht was confused.

“Read this,” he’d said, casting a cursory eye over Albrecht’s dirty
uniform and handing him a slip of paper. The colonel’s own uniform was spotless; the leather straps polished to an ebony shine, his black tunic immaculate, the gold braids, intricate and bright. An Iron Cross hung solid at his breast. To have won that, Albrecht remembered thinking, he must have seen battle at some point. Once, early in the conflict, he must have known the fear, exhilaration, stench, and dirt of this war. His uniform must have known sweat, blood, shit, and soil. Once. But now it was unmarked, a peerless Nazi pattern of starch, insignia, and personal tailoring, typical of the peacocking SS. Unmarked, Albrecht noticed with some satisfaction, but for two light galaxies of dandruff dusting each shoulder.

“Any questions?” the colonel had asked without looking up from his desk. “The corporal outside has all the relevant maps and additional information.”

“Transport arrangements, sir?”

Only now, with just his eyes, without moving his head, did the colonel look up at him. “You’re to go to the transport pool and take what you need,” he said through a tight jaw. Perhaps he’d registered Albrecht’s surprise, or perhaps he just needed to hear his own explanation on the air, to convince himself once more that this order must be obeyed. For whatever reason, he relaxed his expression, gave a short sigh, and leant back in his chair before continuing. He spoke slowly, as if to a child.

“This has come from the top. Reichsführer SS Himmler. All of these special patrols have. The Führer himself is aware too. They both place great importance upon such missions. For the future of the Reich. In this case a suitably qualified officer could not be located within the SS. You, on the other hand, have all the necessary qualifications, as you can see. So to answer the question you were about to ask, that is why.”

Albrecht tried to imagine what bargaining had gone on between the Wehrmacht and the SS over this. Relations between the two organisations had been deteriorating ever since the end of the Russian campaign when the commanders of both had begun to detect
the scent of victory. No doubt he was a chip bartered in a broader game. For the Wehrmacht to give him and his patrol up now, when the whole force of the invasion armies was being called upon, was quite something. For the SS to ask for a Wehrmacht officer to take on one of its own missions was unheard-of. For that officer to then be given the pick of the transport pool was most remarkable of all. Many Wehrmacht companies were already dependent upon captured or requisitioned British and American vehicles among their units.