The Collaborator (13 page)

I
prop my bicycle against the wall of my house. My fingers are stiff and numb from clutching the handlebars: there’s a cold edge to the air today, hinting of winter’s coming. I rub my hands together, feel the sting as the blood rushes back.

I’m relieved to find that nothing has gone wrong in my absence. Millie is playing upstairs and Evelyn is fast asleep in her chair. I empty out my bicycle basket on the kitchen table—the bread, the pork, the tray of seedlings—feeling a brief sense of triumph that I can still feed my family. Behind me, the front door is open onto the yard.

A shadow falls across the floor behind me. I turn, step into my passageway.

‘Good afternoon, Mrs de la Mare.’ Captain Lehmann is standing on my doorstep. I have a sudden shock of recognition—as though I’ve half forgotten his face in the time he’s been away.

‘I haven’t seen you around,’ I say. Then think— That suggests I was looking for him, was too aware of his absence. I feel the blood rush to my face.

‘I have been on leave. I went to Berlin,’ he tells me.

‘Oh.’

I think of the Berlin of the newsreels—the Berlin of the military parades, of Hitler’s speeches—at once preposterous and chilling. And at the same time, I wonder about the people who wait for him in Berlin—his wife, his son—feeling an intense, illicit curiosity. These thoughts from different universes co-existing, colliding, in me.

‘I have some chocolate,’ he says. ‘I bought it on my way back, from a chocolate shop in Cherbourg.’

He holds it out. It’s Suchard milk chocolate, in a wrapper of cornflower blue with gold lettering. Even the look of it is so glamorous. I imagine how it would be as you unwrapped and ate it—the delicious crackle of silver paper, the rush of sweetness in your mouth.

‘Take it. It’s for you,’ he says.

I shake my head. I think I can smell the chocolate faintly through the wrapping. Or maybe it’s just that intense imagination that comes when you’re feeling deprived—when for afternoon tea you had tasteless biscuits made from ersatz flour. My mouth fills startlingly with water, I have to swallow. He watches my throat, I know he can see this.

I blush. I feel a kind of shame.

‘I think you like chocolate, Mrs de la Mare,’ he says. ‘Everybody likes chocolate,’ I say vaguely. ‘So why won’t you take it?’ he says.

‘Thank you, but I can’t,’ I say. I’m speaking very quietly, so as not to wake Evelyn. It makes our conversation seem more intimate than it should. ‘I told you before—when I wouldn’t take the coffee …’

‘But it’s such a small thing, surely—to say no to some chocolate.’

‘That’s all I can do—small things,’ I say. Remembering what Johnnie said.
There’s always something. Maybe just a small thing. You’ve got to do what you can.

‘Mrs de la Mare—no one will die because you took a very small gift from me,’ he says. ‘Nothing is being put at risk here.’

I don’t say anything.

He’s standing a little too close to me. I remember how he swatted the wasp from my sleeve: and thinking that, I feel it again—the bright flare of sensation in me.

‘And you have taken a cigarette from me,’ he says. ‘What is so different now?’

‘I shouldn’t have taken the cigarette,’ I tell him.

His grey pensive gaze is on me.

‘If you won’t take the chocolate for yourself, you can give it to your children. Would that make you feel a little less guilty?’ he says.

I put out my hand and take the chocolate.

He gives a slight sigh—as though he is pleased, relieved. I try not to think about this: why my concession matters, why it is so important to him for me to take this gift.

I
take the chocolate into the kitchen. I open up the paper, breathe in its scent for a moment. I break two pieces from it that I will keep for myself, and put them aside on a saucer. I decide to give Millie and Blanche their portions after tea, so they won’t be too hungry and gobble it up, so they’ll make the most of it.

That evening, when our plates are empty, I go to the cupboard, bring the chocolate in.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ I tell them. ‘A treat.’

‘It’s chocolate. I can
smell
it,’ says Millie.

The girls watch intently as I take off the blue outer wrapper, unwrap the silver paper. There’s a tantalising rustle.

‘Where did you get it, Mum?’ says Blanche.

‘I got it in town,’ I tell her.

‘But I thought there wasn’t any chocolate anywhere,’ she says. ‘That’s what Mrs Sebire’s been saying.’

‘I was lucky. I managed to find some,’ I say.

I break the chocolate into three. I hold some out to Evelyn, but she shakes her head.

‘I won’t have it, thank you, Vivienne. Chocolate doesn’t suit my digestion …’

‘That’s awful. Poor Grandma,’ says Millie. I give the girls their portions. ‘Make the most of it. Eat it slowly,’ I say. Though they don’t, of course.

When they’ve finished, I divide Evelyn’s portion between them. The girls thank her politely, and eat their second helping.

Millie’s mouth is darkly stained with chocolate. She licks her lips elaborately and gives a little sigh. She lifts her face, the evening sun lighting her skin and her eyes.

‘I like chocolate, Mummy. I want to have chocolate all the time.’

‘Millie, you’re so greedy. You’d only get fat if you did,’ says Blanche.

‘I want to be fat,’ says Millie. ‘I want to be fat like a pig.’ She sticks out her chest and makes big fists of her hands. ‘I want to be fat like a
walrus.’

‘You don’t even know what a walrus is,’ says Blanche.

‘I
do.
I
do
know. It looks like this,’ says Millie.

She blows out her cheeks to make a big bloated face. Blanche reaches over and pinches Millie’s face with two fingers, and Millie lets out a little bubble of breath. Both girls find this very funny, and the room is briefly festive with laughter, as though our lives are normal again, as though the war isn’t happening.

A bud of gratitude opens out in my mind—gratitude to Captain Lehmann, for making my children’s eyes shine, for filling our house with laughter. I try to push the thought away: I will not let myself think that.

Blanche stops giggling and wipes her eyes with her hand.

‘D’you remember when we had chocolate whenever we wanted?’ she says, yearningly. ‘When there were shelves in the shops with those big glass jars full of sweets? When there was sherbet and fudge and liquorice?’

There’s incredulity in her voice—as though she finds it hard to believe in this now, to remember.

‘Sweetheart, it’ll happen again,’ I tell her. ‘I know it will. We’ll have all those good things back one day. This won’t go on for ever.’

Blanche shakes her head, as though she doesn’t quite believe me.

‘Can I have the silver paper to press?’ she asks.

I give it to her. She runs her fingers over it, smoothing out the creases. She likes to collect silver paper: she will press it between the pages of one of her Chalet School books.

Evelyn frowns at me. She has a tense, strained look—the look of someone struggling to touch a thing that’s just out of reach.

‘Where did you get that chocolate, Vivienne?’ she asks me.

‘Like I said, in town,’ I tell her. But I’m not looking at her.

Evelyn’s mouth is small and tight, as though she finds my answer somehow unsatisfactory.

‘Chocolate doesn’t suit me,’ she says again. ‘It doesn’t suit me at all.’

When everyone is in bed, I open the kitchen cupboard and take out the two pieces of chocolate I was keeping for myself, briefly wondering why I’m doing this, why I’ve chosen to eat it secretly. I put the first piece in my mouth, feel the surge of
sweetness through me. It’s smoothly velvet, melting on my tongue; the taste, after months of bland food, is somehow exotic, hinting of the Tropics, of abundant plantations and warm starlit nights. I eat it slowly, hold it in my mouth for a very long time.

S
unday is a beautiful day; and in the afternoon Blanche sits out in the garden, catching the last of the autumn sunshine, wanting to top up her tan. Millie is playing gymkhanas, with the garden broom as a horse; she’s wound hair-ribbons through the bristles, and she’s galloping round a pile of grass-clippings left from when I last mowed the lawn. I watch them for a moment through the living-room window.

I play the piano for Evelyn—a Chopin Nocturne that she likes: it’s gentle, rather elegaic. For myself I love his Mazurkas the best—they’re rather harsh and sad, with a streak of wildness in them: but Evelyn finds them too strange. For a while I’m lost in the music—the whole world settling around me and rearranging itself, everything fluid, perfected.

‘That was very nice, Vivienne,’ says Evelyn politely, when I’ve finished.

There’s a sudden shriek from outside. ‘No, Millie! You
beast!’

I go to the window. Blanche has jumped up. There are lawn clippings stuck in her hair: as I watch, she spits out blades of grass. Millie is watching her sister, at once aghast and thrilled.
While I was wrapped up in the music, she must have crept behind Blanche and tipped grass all over her head.

‘You stupid little idiot!’ Blanche is furious.
‘And
I’ve only just washed my hair … I’ve had enough. I’m going to
slaughter
you,’ she says.

Millie runs off, shrieking. I open up the French window, go out to intervene, but they’re too quick for me. Blanche disappears round the side of the house, chasing Millie. I hear the crunch of their feet on the gravel, then a thud, a silence, a scream.

Evelyn shakes her head.

‘Trouble’s coming, Vivienne …’

Blanche rushes in to find me. She looks worried.

‘Mum, you’d better come.’

Millie has tumbled on the gravel. On her hands, the grazes are shallow, but there’s a nasty gash on her knee, ragged, dirty, bleeding profusely.

I put her in the bath to try and clean out the cut. Normally I’d have put salt in the bath to disinfect the wound, but salt is very precious now. The gash still has a dirty look; there’s gravel stuck in the broken skin that I can’t get to wash out. I know the wound needs antiseptic. I pick up the bottle of TCP, but Millie’s face dissolves.

‘No! It’ll hurt! Mummy, no!’ Her shoulders shake with sobs. I can’t face holding her down. I tell myself that the cut will probably heal just fine anyway.

A knock at my bedroom door wakes me, dragging me up out of sleep. I turn on my lamp and go to open the door, my body slow and lumbering.

It’s Millie. Her wet face shines in the lamplight; her lashes are clotted together with tears. ‘Mummy. My leg hurts.’

I put out a tentative finger to touch her knee. The skin has a hot, inflamed feel. Millie cries out at my touch. I’m so cross with myself: I should have been firmer, and disinfected the cut.

‘I’ll take you back to bed,’ I say, ‘and we’ll think what to do in the morning …’

I’m restless. I can’t get back to sleep. After a while, I get up, and listen outside her room. She’s still crying, but I decide to leave her. The sobs sound drowsy; I know that soon she’ll sink down into sleep and it’s better not to disturb her.

In the night the weather breaks, and the rain is there in my dream. I dream that there are gaping holes in the roof of Le Colombier, and the rain has come in, and my entire house is flooded. I wade slowly through my living room, which is knee-deep in water, and lit by a pure, chill aquamarine light. Things from my life float past me on the shining flood—my poetry books, dolls from Millie’s dolls’ house, my mother’s musical box. They’re all drenched with water, ruined, but in the dream I view all this with equanimity: the depredations of the flood water don’t concern me at all—the way it stains, rots, devastates. I just let everything drift past me. I take a kind of voluptuous pleasure in not struggling any more, in giving in to what must happen.

In the morning, it’s still raining, with a heavy pewter sky.

As Blanche goes to work, she turns towards me in the doorway, sweeping her hair back, tying a chiffony scarf round her head. Her skin is golden from yesterday’s sun and she smells of rose geranium talc. The rain hisses on the gravel behind her, and
patches of standing water gleam, giving back the grey metallic shine of the sky.

‘Mum, is Millie all right? I heard her crying,’ she says.

‘I’m not sure,’ I tell her. ‘I’m rather worried about that cut on her knee. I probably ought to try and get the doctor to call.’

But I’m reluctant: I don’t really want to leave Millie. And it would take an age to contact him. I’d have to cycle up to his house and hope that he or his wife were there; or I could try and ring from the nearest phone box, which is almost as far.

Blanche is frowning, her blue anxious gaze on my face.

‘Well, you will if you’re worried, Mum, won’t you? Promise me you will.’

‘Yes. Of course.’

Something at the edge of my vision makes me suddenly turn. The window at Les Vinaires is open. I see something in the darkness of the room beyond the window—a paleness that I can’t make out—a face, or the sleeve of a shirt. I feel a quick impotent rage. I hate this—the way the men who live there know the most intimate details about us. As though the Occupation entitles them to see straight into our lives.

Blanche’s eyes glitter with tears.

‘It was my fault, wasn’t it?’

‘No, of course not, sweetheart. You were both just fooling about. It’s just unlucky she fell on the gravel.’

‘I shouldn’t have got so cross,’ she says. ‘But you know what she’s like, Mum, don’t you? She looks as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. But she can be such a pain in the neck …’

She walks off, pulling her gabardine close around her; though it’s raining hard, and I doubt the coat will keep her dry for long.

T
here are footsteps on the gravel, and a knock at the door. My heart thuds. But it isn’t who I thought: it’s Captain Richter, his black hair plastered slick against his skull by the rain.

‘Excuse me, Mrs de la Mare, but one of us overheard you talking.’

Fear has me by the throat. Have I done something wrong—broken some rule that I didn’t even know existed? His clever dark eyes are on me.

‘One of us heard you say that your daughter was hurt.’ His voice is emollient as lanolin: he has seen the fear in my face.

I look at him uncertainly.

‘I was a doctor, Mrs de la Mare, in my other life—before …’ He opens out his hands, makes a small, rather helpless gesture that seems to encompass everything—the war, the Occupation, all of it. A gesture that says there are no words for these things.

‘Oh,’ I say.

I try to imagine him as a doctor—no uniform, no gun. It’s hard to do.

‘Would you like me to examine your daughter?’ he says. I don’t say anything.

‘I worked as a surgeon, at the Rudolf-Virchow Hospital in Berlin.’ He smiles slightly. ‘Though I’m sure that surgery won’t be necessary …’

When he came here before, he warned me about the curfew. I remember his stern look, the razor-thin line of his mouth. Now he’s offering to examine Millie. I’m unnerved, wrong-footed: I don’t know how to be with these men.

I hesitate. But then I remember how Millie sobbed in the night.

‘It’s her leg,’ I tell him. ‘She fell on the gravel. I’m worried it might be infected. Why don’t you come in?’

In that moment, as I invite him into my house, I have a sudden queasy sense of misgiving. As I turn, my passageway looms at me—claustrophobic, oppressive, the shadowy walls pressing in. An urgent voice comes in my head, scolding me, outraged, appalled.
What on earth do you think you are doing? This man is your enemy. You’re trusting him with your daughter, but he isn’t on your side …
But I can’t go back now.

Millie is on the living-room sofa, her sore knee propped on a cushion. She looks up as we go in; in spite of the pain, her face is bright with curiosity.

He kneels on the floor beside her.

‘Millie, my name is Max. I am a doctor,’ he says.

She gestures extravagantly at her knee, enjoying being a patient, enjoying the drama of this.

‘It hurts,’ she says.

He examines her, touching the skin around the gash, bending her knee. She flinches away from his touch. A splinter of doubt
swims in her eye when he hurts her, and I have an urge to rush forward and pull her away.

‘So how did you cut yourself, Millie?’ he says.

‘It was Blanche. She chased me,’ she says.

‘My daughter also likes chasing and running,’ he says. ‘And teasing her big brother …’

He must have seen everything that happened from the windows of Les Vinaires. I feel a little surge of hostility towards him.

But Millie is at once intrigued.

‘How old is she? Does she fall over?’ she says.

‘She is six. And, yes, she does fall over.’ His voice softens, talking about his daughter. ‘She is always running and rushing. She cannot be still …’

He stands up, turns to me.

‘The cut is infected, as you thought,’ he tells me. ‘She needs medicine.’ He takes a brown glass bottle out of his pocket. ‘These are called sulphonamides. They will help her fight the infection. Are you willing for me to treat her?’

I nod.

‘Millie, can you swallow pills?’ he asks her.

‘Of course I can. I’m four and a half,’ she tells him.

He hands me the bottle, explains how she should take them. He says goodbye to Millie. Above us, I can hear Evelyn creaking around in her room; I’m praying she won’t come down just yet. I take him out to the door.

I think about him being a surgeon; and somehow that makes sense to me. A surgeon would need to be rather distant and dispassionate—and I’m aware of a kind of remoteness in this gloomy, cynical man. He’s an observer, someone who watches from the margins—separate, withdrawn, but seeing everything.

‘Do you miss your work in Berlin?’ I ask him. Feeling a sense of social obligation—a need to be polite, now I am indebted to him.

‘I miss it very much.’ His expression darkens; his face has a hollowed-out look. ‘But many people are missing things in these troubled times, as we know. The ones who make the decisions have other plans for our lives. As always.’

I’m startled. Should he be saying this, to me? Is he criticising Hitler? What do these men, these soldiers, really think about the war?

‘It is like that for all of us,’ he says. ‘None of us can be where we would want to be …’ Then he shrugs slightly, backing off from that moment of revelation, as though he’s a little embarrassed that he has given something away. ‘But in the circumstances, we consider ourselves fortunate to be here, on your beautiful island,’ he tells me. ‘We are, all of us, grateful … Though I imagine you view our presence here rather differently.’ He has a clever, self-deprecating smile.

‘Thank you so much for your help,’ I say.

I open the door, glance nervously up the lane, to be sure that no one can see him coming out of my house. He turns and leaves me, stepping fastidiously between the puddles in the gravel. The rain has stopped now; the dark fallen leaves are shiny as leather with wet.

I wonder who told him that Millie was hurt, who it was heard us talking. Was Captain Lehmann watching our house? Did Captain Lehmann send him?

Evelyn comes to find me in the kitchen. She’s frowning. ‘One of them came here, didn’t he? One of the Hun. I heard him.’

‘Don’t worry, Evelyn. Everything’s all right,’ I say soothingly. ‘Why did he come here, Vivienne?’

There’s an air of agitation about her. She makes little fluttery gestures: you can see the fine bones in the backs of her hands, like harp strings.

‘He’s a doctor,’ I tell her. ‘He came to have a look at Millie’s knee.’

‘You shouldn’t let them in here, Vivienne,’ she says. ‘Evelyn—he was only trying to help.’

‘Well, maybe that’s what he told you … You can’t trust the Hun,’ she tells me. ‘The Hun is full of deceit.’

‘He offered to examine Millie. He was kind,’ I say.

I decide it’s better not to tell her about the pills he gave us.

She shakes her head.

‘The Hun is always slippery. We don’t want the Hun in our house,’ she says.

She goes through to the living room, takes her knitting out of her basket. I fetch a blanket for her legs. She’s so frail. She feels the cold all year.

Through the window, I see that the weather is clearing rapidly: the seam of the sky is split apart and bright blue light pours through. More leaves have been torn from the trees in the storm: the world looks different—opened up.

Evelyn is still upset.

‘You shouldn’t have let him in, Vivienne.’ ‘Well, it’s done now,’ I tell her. ‘And you really don’t need to worry. I can’t imagine why it would ever happen again.’