Resistance (33 page)

“Have you killed people?” she said quietly, speaking as if they were in a crowded room and she wanted no one else to hear them.

Albrecht didn’t move, just let out a brief, almost imperceptible sigh, like an escaped fragment of something larger collapsing within him. His gaze shifted from the priory to a buzzard catching its balance on the morning air in the field below them. “Yes,” he said at last.

“How many?”

“I don’t know.” He watched the buzzard drop then turn a slow glide over the field.

“You wouldn’t think it,” Sarah said. “You’d think t’see it. But you don’t.”

“No,” Albrecht said, “you don’t.”

He pushed himself off the wall and walked along the track that ran away from the ruins, trying to get a better view of the priory below. Sarah followed a few feet behind him until he stopped and sat on a hummock of moss under a tree. Looking down at the ground he tore a few blades of grass from between his feet before looking back up at her standing beside him. “What will you do?” he said. “When this is over?”

“Nothing. Stay here, with Tom.”

Albrecht smiled and nodded his head as if he’d been stupid to ask such an obvious question. “Of course,” he said, “of course you will.” He ripped another handful of grass from between his legs. Sarah came and sat beside him.

“You are a remarkable woman, Sarah.”

The sound of her name in his mouth caught her unawares. She looked up at him but he was staring back down at the priory again. In all the months they’d known each other, they’d never used each other’s names. She had always been Mrs. Lewis and he, whenever she spoke of him to Maggie or the others, was “the captain.” In calling
her Sarah it was as if some game they’d been playing was suddenly over. Except she’d never been playing at anything.

“You really believe they’ll come back, don’t you?”

There was no challenge in his voice, just a quiet admiration. Nothing for her to resist or to provoke her anger.

“Yes,” she said. “I do.”

She was lying, but only partly. She didn’t know about the other men, but she did know about Tom. And she did believe he would come back, or at least that he was still here, that he wasn’t dead. She wouldn’t believe that he could die and she wouldn’t know, somehow. A shift in the air about her, a tint upon the light of the day. Somehow, she’d know.

“What about you?” she asked Albrecht. “Will you go home?”

Albrecht followed the buzzard as it made another slow spiralling descent before coming to rest in the upper branches of a tree at the edge of the field. The bird stretched its wings once, then folded them, disappearing to a dark bud, invisible to the passing eye.

“I have no home to go back to,” he said. “I was a student before the war. Always on the move. My parents’ house is no longer there. It was destroyed in an air raid. The same one that killed my fiancée.”

He’d never mentioned Ebbe to Sarah before. She had never wanted to know anything but the barest of facts about his past. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He leant back against the tree. “I was in Russia when they died. I didn’t know until over a month later. For over a month I wrote to all of them, but they were already dead, and I never knew.”

She wanted to reach out and touch him then, but she couldn’t. He was wearing those clothes. To touch them on him would be a betrayal of everything she was holding on to. “Germany, though,” she said eventually. “That’s your home, isn’t it? You’ll be going back there when it’s over, won’t you?”

Albrecht rested his head against the trunk of the tree, closed his eyes, and tilted his face towards the sun rising over the Hatterall
ridge behind them. “When I was stationed in Holland,” he said, speaking with his eyes still closed, “I used to go to a park every Sunday to listen to a band that played there. They were very good. I got to know the bandleader. One day I saw a Party official also watching the band. He was holding a clipboard, making marks on it with his pencil. When they were packing up, I asked the bandleader what the official had been doing. He looked at me as if I was mad not to know. ‘Checking we’re playing within the regulations,’ he said. ‘No sideways swaying of the saxophone. No muted trumpet. No ostentatious trills or double-stopping.’ What he meant was nothing that might resemble ‘Negro music,’ as he called it.” Albrecht thought of the distaste on Steiner’s face when they’d tuned through snatches of jazz on the radio. “I am German,” he said, turning his face away from the sun and looking back down at the abandoned priory. “But Germany is not my home anymore.”

For some minutes they sat there, beneath the tree, saying nothing. A blackbird sang from one of the ruined walls beside them. A crow cawed, brash and harsh, as it fought in the tree above with a pair of magpies. It was going to be a warm day. Sarah could feel it, the potential heat heavy in the air. She was in the valley of her childhood, where she’d grown up. She knew the contours of the land about them intimately. And yet she was also in a place unfamiliar to her, somewhere off the edges of any map she’d ever known.

Eventually it was Sarah who spoke again.

“That night,” she said, speaking slowly as if it was an effort to draw up the words. “The night they left. All of us woke late the next morning. We’ve never spoken about it, but we did. Slept right through. Never heard a thing. All of us. I’ve tried speaking to Maggie. Ask her why she thinks that was. But I can’t. She knows why, though, an’ so do I. I even went looking for the bottle. But I can’t ask her. It’d be too much, I reckon.”

Albrecht shifted his back up the trunk and turned to look at Sarah. “Your husbands did the right thing,” he said. “It is what men all over Europe have done. It is what I would have done.”

“That may be,” Sarah said, sighing through a weak smile. “But that don’t make it any easier. I’d rather they were wrong an’ here than right an’ not.”

Albrecht turned back to face the valley, then looked over again at the ruined walls of the house Landor had only ever dreamt of living in. “You know, he was a very fine writer of letters, Landor,” he said, still looking at the ruins. “There’s a line in one of them that has stayed with me ever since I read it: ‘More people are good because they are happy than happy because they are good.’ This is what he says. And he is right.” He glanced back at Sarah. She met his eye then looked away. “It is very hard to be good now,” he continued. “But after all this, when we are able to be happy again, then I think maybe we will be good to each other again too. In ways that do not have to be so painful.”

He kept his eyes on her face, willing her to turn back and look at him. But she did not. She just looked down at the grass, nodding her head, as might a child who wasn’t really listening to the words being spoken to her.

“This is what I hope, anyway,” Albrecht added more quietly as he unclipped the water bottle from his belt. Unscrewing the cap he offered it to Sarah. She shook her head without looking at him. He tipped the bottle to his own lips and drank briefly, before finding himself swallowing at nothing but air. He upended the bottle and a few drops of water landed in his palm.

“Here,” Sarah said suddenly, holding out her hand. “There’s a standpipe in the yard of the farm.”

Without thinking Albrecht passed her the bottle. As he did he saw her eyes were glassy with tears and the frown line cut deep in the middle of her brow. She stood up, brushing loose bits of moss from the back of her blue dress, and it was only then that he realised what she’d meant. “No, Sarah, you can’t—” he began, but it was too late. She was already walking away from him over the fields towards the priory and the farm.

Albrecht watched her shrink away from him down the shallow slope through the yellow scatterings of buttercups. It seemed to take
her hours, not minutes, to cross the field and the one beyond. For a moment he saw the whole scene from the perspective of that buzzard, high in its tree. Him, sat beside the ruins of Landor’s house, and her, walking through the acres of green and gold towards the arches of the priory, with nothing more than the lengthening thread of her footprints in the dew to connect them. By the time she slipped round the corner of the farm, she was no more than a dot of blue against the priory’s grey stone. Albrecht was suddenly convinced that was it. That she wouldn’t come back. That, like Bethan’s easy departure, Sarah had simply walked away from him, knowing he wouldn’t follow her. He sat under the tree, his mind reeling. Should he go after her? Should he try to bring her back? Had she really just left him like that, after everything they’d said? After several minutes of straining his eyes at the ruins of the priory Albrecht could bear it no longer, and he was about to risk going after her when he saw the blue of her dress again appearing round the corner of the farm as she began to retrace that thread of footprints over the fields back towards him. He felt a wave of relief, the sudden gratitude of a reprieve. Closing his eyes he tilted his head back against the tree once more, thanking the God he didn’t believe in.

As Sarah got closer he saw she was holding something other than just the water bottle. It was a piece of paper, a yellow piece of paper that she folded twice then placed in her pocket before reaching him. When she did her face was flushed from her quick walk up the slope and her eyes were clear of tears again. “Come on,” she said, “it’s getting late. We’d best be going now.”

M
aggie, you can’t. It’s madness.”

“Don’t be silly, girl. Nothin’ mad about it,” Maggie said from over the rim of her mug. “An’ we’ve got to do something, anyway. Mary’s right. It’s gone on long enough. The show’s as good a place as any to see how things are lying.”

Sarah was sitting at Maggie’s kitchen table again, just the two of them. Maggie had a bad cold and had brewed herself a pot of elderflower and honey. The bright morning cast the window frame’s shadow across the table’s surface, a dark cross separating four squares of light gradually slipping over the scarred and pitted wood. One of the squares caught the corner of a yellow piece of paper lying between them, its heavy type buckled at the creases where Sarah had folded it into her pocket the day before.

By Permission of the Office of the Reich Sub-Area
Commandant for the Western Region
Saturday, June 9
Llanthony Agricultural Show and Country Fair
Ploughing Match, Sports, Horse and Stock Showing

“But why him, Maggie? You’d find someone at the show, wouldn’t you?”

Maggie frowned at Sarah as she took another sip from the steaming mug as if to admonish her for asking such a stupid question. “You’ve seen him with the colt,” she said, placing the mug back on the table. “He’s good with him. The horse likes him, knows him.
You know it was him not me as first haltered him, don’t you? Even Will never did that.”

Sarah knew Maggie was right about this at least. She’d watched Alex handle the colt, seen the relationship he’d developed with the young horse, which had grown into a strong yearling, too much for Maggie now, thick at the neck, big-boned, alert and quick. Alex, however, had found a manner with him. The colt’s head only came to his shoulder, but he was still as slow and gentle about the young horse as he would have been around a frail old woman.

The amount of milk produced by Maggie’s cows had been declining for weeks now. When Alex came over to help her, he’d had more time to stay on and work with the colt. At first the horse was skittish, familiar for so long with only the smells of the mare and Maggie. But each day Alex moved a little closer, talking to him all the time, until one morning the colt let him run his hand the length of his neck. By the time he came to halter him, there’d been hardly any struggle. Maggie had looked on nervously from over the stable’s half-door as the colt tossed his head a couple of times and began quickstepping his hind legs sideways. As soon as the halter was on, however, he’d settled, allowing Alex to stroke his mane and talk once more, low and soft, into his ear.

Maggie never understood what Alex was saying to the colt, and Alex didn’t understand Maggie either when she talked away to him as they worked. But this hadn’t stopped them from communicating. With the colt between them, they didn’t need a common language. Everything was movement and rhythm, sound not words, a shared instinct for how the young horse would react, how he’d shift his weight, moments before he did. The first time Alex ran him in the meadow, his hooves flashing out high, his thick neck curved tight, was also the first time since her husband left that Maggie had felt, for the briefest of moments, a lightness inside her.

“I still don’t understand why you’d want t’go now,” Sarah said, turning the poster round to look at it again. She wished she’d never brought it back from the priory, wished she’d never gone down there at all. It had certainly been a mistake to show it to Maggie.

“Don’t you, bach?” Maggie gave Sarah a long look. Again she saw how she’d fallen so much earlier than the younger woman. She stood up and moved over to the dresser. Standing on the tips of her toes, she picked out a long card from behind the plates on the top shelf.

“You know what Will could be like,” she said, her back to Sarah as she looked over the card. “Never so pleased with himself as when he’d run a good yearling.” She shook her head. “Daft bugger.” Then she turned back to Sarah. “He’d have wanted to run this colt at Llanthony, I know he would. So that’s why. Because we should be carrying on as usual where we can, doing what we’d be doing as if this never happened.” She paused, looked out the window, then back down at the card in her hand. “Because it’s what Will would have wanted. That’s why, bach.”