The Child Left Behind (20 page)

‘Thank you,’ Bridgette said, and they moved towards the church door. There was no time to say anything else. In the small porch Lisette had just finished rearranging the folds on Bridgette’s dress when the strains of the wedding march could be heard.

The church was fuller than Bridgette had expected it to be, and filled with the happy cheerful faces of friends of her own and her parents, or of the Laurents, or neighbours who had watched her grow up. With Lisette falling into place behind her, she walked down the aisle slowly and on Legrand’s arm, and while he had an expression on his face that Yvette said later would curdle milk, she smiled from side to side at all the well-wishers.

Bridgette saw Xavier, with Edmund, leave the pew they’d occupied at the front of the church to stand in front of the altar and she felt a tingle of excitement that began in her toes and spread all over her body. She could never remember feeling so happy, and she loved Xavier so much she ached. She kept her eyes fastened on him, the man she would soon promise to love and honour in sickness and in health, whether they were rich or whether they were poor until they were parted by death.

Within a few weeks of marriage, Bridgette knew just how lucky she was in having such a considerate husband. Their first night together set the pattern when Xavier spent time caressing and fondling her slowly and sensually. When he placed his lips on hers, she responded eagerly, and then he kissed her lingeringly, then let his tongue slip in and out of her mouth until yearning shafts of passion were shooting all through her so that she moaned aloud. Still he waited, and not until she was giving little yelps of pure desire did he enter her.

Later that first night, as she lay in Xavier’s arms, her mother’s words came back to her about the gentle and considerate husband who would wait for his bride to be ready. She couldn’t help wondering if her mother had been talking from experience, but then how could she be? She knew her father was the sort to seek his own pleasure first and she doubted it had been different when he had been younger.

She wished her mother had such joy and happiness in her life, and the contentment of curling up with a young husband, as she was doing, and she wondered afresh what had induced her to marry a man like her father. She hated him with a passion and didn’t care how wicked that made her. But she could do nothing to help her mother, or try to cement over the wide-open chasms in her marriage.

Suddenly the events of the day made her feel very drowsy and she cuddled against Xavier, closed her eyes and was soon fast asleep.

As one month slipped into another Bridgette found herself loving Xavier more and more. She knew what a marvellous father he would make and she longed to hold their child in her arms, but she was disappointed time after time, and she told herself to have patience.

Great-aunt Bernadette sickened and died at the end of January 1935. Gabrielle had wanted to go to the funeral, but Legrand wouldn’t allow it. Bridgette felt so sorry for her mother when she told her this, because she knew how much she had loved her aunt, and she told her to stand up to her father.

Gabrielle shook her head sadly, though some days she reflected on the courage she once had that enabled her to creep out at night to meet Finn. However, fear for her daughter, as well as herself, had dogged her life and stripped her of any
confidence she might have had and so she had allowed herself to be treated shamelessly by both her husband and his son. Her daughter would have a much better life, she knew, and was immensely glad, but for her it was already too late.

Warmth began to steal into the days of early spring and buds started to appear on the trees when Lisette and Edmund Gublain became engaged. The marriage was set for September 1935. After, Lisette would move into the house in Rue Charles Jonart that Edmund shared with his widowed mother.

Bridgette was delighted for them. She had got to know Edmund since she’d married Xavier and liked him a lot, but she truly loved Lisette, like a sister and she knew that she would miss her greatly.

‘I will still see you everyday when I’m married because I’m continuing in the shop,’ Lisette said, a few days before her wedding. ‘At least until the babies come.’

‘That’s what I said,’ Bridgette reminded her. ‘And the babies seem as far away as ever.’

‘It’s early days,’ Lisette consoled. ‘I’m sure that it will happen soon.’

‘That’s what I tell myself,’ Bridgette said.

However, things got decidedly harder for Bridgette when Lisette fell pregnant almost immediately after the wedding and, in June 1936, she gave birth to a little boy she called Jean-Paul. He was the most adorable child and Bridgette loved him almost as much as his mother did. She missed
Lisette, though, for since his birth she had given up work in the milliner’s and Maurice had taken on a young boy as an apprentice to train up.

Jean-Paul was only a couple of months old when everyone was talking of the Olympic Games, which were being held in Berlin. Herr Hitler, Chancellor of Germany had refused to shake the hand of the black African-American athlete Jesse Owens, or decorate him with the four gold medals that he’d won.

‘The man is mad,’ Maurice said one night at the evening meal. ‘Anyone can see that, and the German people are worse for voting him into such a position of power.’

‘They were bound to think that he was good for the country,’ Xavier said, ‘because he did turn Germany round. It was in a dreadful mess before.’

‘And whose fault was that?’ Maurice burst out. ‘They were the aggressors in that dreadful war that took so many young lives. Many of my friends did not come back and I can’t forget that.’

Xavier knew how much his father had suffered when he fought in the war. ‘I’m no lover of Germany, Papa,’ he said gently, ‘All I’m saying is, if your country is in a mess and someone comes along and gives you a bit of hope for the future, then you are going to vote for that person. It’s human nature.’

‘I don’t think the Jews in Germany have much hope,’ Bridgette put in. ‘Not according to Aunt
Yvette, anyway. She said that Jews fleeing from Germany are streaming into Paris and the tales they tell of what is happening to those left behind are so shocking they are almost unbelievable.’

‘Well, I’m sorry for them if the tales are true,’ Maurice said. ‘But I’m not that surprised. Funny race of people, the Germans. Personally, I think the only good German is a dead one.’

It was a shocking thing to say, especially from the peaceable Maurice, but no one said anything to him because in their heart of hearts they all felt something of the same.

In March 1938, Hitler marched into Austria and took over the country. He called it the Anschluss and most of the world looked on in surprise, mainly because the Austrian people hadn’t seemed to mind that much.

‘Maybe that’s because he is Austrian by birth,’ Bridgette said.

‘Well, whatever he is, he has control of the two countries now,’ Marie said.

‘I think that this is the tip of the iceberg,’ Maurice murmured.

‘It may be,’ Xavier admitted. ‘And perhaps we shouldn’t be all doom and gloom. Austria, by all accounts, welcomed Hitler in and so that’s that, really.’

‘I hope it is,’ Marie said. ‘Lisette can do without this worry with her expecting again so don’t you start all this war talk when she’s around.’

Bridgette had no wish to upset Lisette, but how she envied her being pregnant again. When, in early September 1938, Lisette gave birth to a little girl she called Leonie, Bridgette tried to be happy for her, but though she said the right words her heart felt as heavy as lead because her arms ached to hold her own child.

In late September, the paper reported that Hitler was intending invading Czechoslovakia unless he was given Sudetenland, where the majority of people spoke German.

‘Why do they?’ Bridgette asked.

‘Because Sudetenland belonged to Germany until the war,’ Xavier told her. ‘Under the terms of the Versailles Treaty after the Armistice, it was taken off them.’

‘So what can they do about it now, if it was all agreed at the time?’

Xavier shrugged. ‘Give it back, I suppose. Anyway, according to the paper, Britain’s Prime Minister, Chamberlain, is having a meeting with Hitler in Munich to discuss it, and our own Prime Minister, Daladier, is going too, and Stalin.’

‘That’s another one I wouldn’t trust,’ Maurice said. ‘That Stalin.’

‘Nor me either, Papa,’ Xavier said. ‘I think that he and Hitler are in the same mould, but if between them they can come up with a scheme to avert war, then it has got to be a good thing, however it’s done.’

The Laurents’ weren’t the only household to
breathe a sigh of relief when they had heard that with, the gift of Sudetenland, Hitler was appeased. The threat of war had been lifted.

In late autumn, the Laurents heard news of a pogrom against the Jews that had begun in Munich. They read with horror of the people thrown on to the streets while houses and businesses were destroyed, and synagogues set alight, till the sky was blood red with flames and the pavements like carpets of crystal with shattered glass. The violence quickly spread to other towns and villages until it was estimated that 1,300 synagogues had been burned to the ground and many people left dead or badly injured. Sinisterly 30,000 had simply disappeared.

The savagery and brutality of it shocked everyone. ‘What was it all for anyway?’ Bridgette asked as they sat eating dinner that night. ‘What had they done?’

‘They had done nothing,’ Xavier said. ‘It seems a Polish Jew shot a German official in Paris because he was angry at the way his family had been treated in Poland. This was Germany’s idea of revenge.’

‘Against innocent people?’

‘Look,’ Xavier said, ‘this is how I see all this. After the Armistice and the terrible loss of life in the Great War, everyone wanted to make Germany pay. Land was confiscated and given to other countries Germany had violated and they had to pay back so much compensation that the country was sinking under the debts it owed. Then, along comes
a little Austrian who feeds the German people’s resentment and convinces them that it is somehow all the Jews’ fault.’

‘But why?’ Marie said.

‘They wanted to hear it.’ Xavier said. ‘They wanted someone to blame.’

‘I think you have hit the nail on the head there,’ Maurice said. ‘And when they have finished with the Jews, who d’you think they’ll blame then?’

‘The countries that defeated them in the last war?’ Xavier answered quietly.

‘You have it exactly.’

‘You mean France?’ Marie said. ‘We’ll have to suffer it all again.’

‘France, most certainly,’ Maurice said. ‘In fact most of Europe.’

‘And,’ Xavier said, ‘I don’t believe such a man as Hitler will be easily appeased, whatever paper he signed.’

Xavier was soon proved right. Despite Hitler’s assurance, he invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939. In doing so, Germany had broken the terms of the Munich agreement and the threat of war in Europe moved closer.

A few weeks later, Xavier said to Bridgette, ‘I think that war with Germany is almost inevitable now. Italy probably will be dragged into it too, with Mussolini in charge, and Spain, now that Franco has won the civil war. At the moment, France is surrounded by potential enemies.’

‘I know,’ said Bridgette, and her voice was little above a whisper.

‘And so, I must fight for France.’

‘Oh, Xavier…’

‘Every man will be needed, Bridgette,’ Xavier said. ‘Anyway, there will be no choice because I’ll be called up. This is just to prepare you for what will happen. Edmund feels the same.’

‘But Edmund has a family.’

‘And he will not be the only one,’ Xavier replied.

They both received their call-up papers as Germany cast its eyes towards Poland. Britain had promised to protect and support Poland, and Xavier knew once the German tanks rolled into Poland’s streets, France, and all the countries surrounding her, would be plunged into another major war, and they would have to fight to try and stop the monster creeping across Europe.

By the time Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Xavier and Edmund were at a training camp. Though Xavier wrote every week to both Bridgette and his parents, he could tell them little, certainly not where he was or what he was doing, except in the most general terms. As the autumn rolled on, Bridgette couldn’t tell him either about the Allied soldiers, mainly British, who were coming ashore from ports all across Northern France to help the French Army in their fight against the German aggressors.

‘You will see a difference now, mark my words,’
Maurice announced one night as they sat around the fireside. ‘Trouble is, those Germans have not hit anything that you could really term resistance. I mean, they goose-stepped unopposed into both Austria and Czechoslovakia.’

‘The Poles fought,’ Bridgette reminded him.

‘Yes they did,’ Maurice conceded. ‘And they could have won. What is facing us now could have been decided then and there if the Red Army had helped them. That’s what I mean about Stalin. He held his armies back until the Poles admitted defeat. This time it will be different. You will find Hitler’s soldiers running back to Germany with their tails between their legs.’

Bridgette hoped he was right. Maurice also had immense faith in the Maginot Line.

‘What is it, exactly?’ Marie asked one evening.

‘Five hundred steel-reinforced, heavily guarded forts erected on a hillside, that’s what,’ Maurice said. ‘You would be too young to remember, Bridgette, but France was left in a terrible state after the last war. There was so much bloodshed and we lost so many young fit men. But good farmland was churned up too, and we also lost so many buildings—homes, whole towns and villages and farms destroyed—that it was thought that we needed protection in case there was ever to be another war.’

‘After such tragedy,’ Marie said, ‘and so much grieving all over France, no one imagined that it might happen again.’

‘Well, it has,’ Maurice said emphatically. ‘So isn’t it good that people had the hindsight to build this Maginot Line to protect us?’

‘And you are certain it will?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Maurice confidently. ‘It stretches from the Swiss border to the Belgium one, not all the way to the coast because it doesn’t need to do that. The Ardennes forest is impassable.’

Bridgette felt herself relax. France would be safe from invasion. The French Army and its Allies would easily repulse any German offensive and the war would soon be over.

The men were coming home. It was mid-November and Bridgette, Lisette and Marie were in a fever of excitement. Their excitement, though, was tinged with apprehension because they all knew that the training was finished and when the leave was over, Xavier and Edmund would be making for the battlefields.

Bridgette tried hard not to let these thoughts spoil the few days that they had together. She wasn’t totally successful, though, because they would flit unbidden across her mind and she would feel a hollow emptiness in the pit of her stomach. Xavier would see her face change, but he knew what was wrong. Their lovemaking those few days had a deeper and more ardent quality about it.

Bridgette had already decided that however she felt, when the time came for Xavier to leave she would not make things harder for him by weeping
all over him and begging him not to go. So that morning, when he swung his kitbag on to his shoulders, though she felt tears tingling behind her eyes she held them back as Xavier drew her into his arms and kissed her goodbye.