The Collaborator (19 page)

T
his is how it is, for a long time. This is my life now. I grow accustomed to secrecy, to hiding, to the life I share with Gunther when we close the door on the war, on the world, and lie together in my bed, in the soft shuddering light of my candles. Sometimes I think of the story I read to Millie, just before the Occupation—the story of the dancing princesses, who at night went through their trapdoor and down all the winding stairs and through the grove of golden trees to a secret, separate world. This life begins to seem almost natural to me. Now he will stay with me most of the night, and leave my bed very early, when the first white fingers of morning reach into the room. I feel such peacefulness, falling asleep in his arms. Sometimes I find myself thinking, This is how marriage should be.

Often I am afraid—that another letter will come; or that one of Johnnie’s eager friends will paint a swastika on the wall of my house. I worry that someone who suspects me will whisper to Evelyn or Blanche, will tell them about me and Gunther. And when I think that, I feel how fragile everything is—how
my whole life here could be torn apart. Sometimes, I’ll hear the letter-box snap, and I’ll clamp my lips together to stop myself crying out. But there are no more anonymous letters.

One day when I’m walking to Angie’s, I pass a big old oak that leans out over the lane. In the corrugated bark of its trunk, lovers have carved their initials with a penknife: VS, FL, the letters intertwined. Just for a moment, I feel such a pang of envy, for couples who live an everyday life: who walk hand in hand in the lanes and leave indelible marks of their closeness, who can express their love in such an easy, ordinary way. Nothing furtive or hidden.

All this while, the war seems distant from me. There are the shortages, of course, the restrictions, the curfew: but I’m not so aware of the power of the Germans, the way they govern our lives, here in my hidden valley, with my family and my lover. Gwen at Elm Tree Farm still hears the German soldiers in the night, marching and singing their martial songs: owning our island, owning the dark; but you can’t hear them here, in the peace of these deep lanes. I concentrate on the daily things. I tell myself this is what matters—to care for my children and Evelyn, to bring us through this somehow.

I worry most about Evelyn. She seems to be losing weight, however much I cajole her to eat. She often has a blurred look in her eyes, as though everything is obscure to her; as though her life seems like the back of a piece of tapestry, and she sees, not the pattern, but only the frayed ends and knots.

One day she’s knitting in the living room; she looks up as I go in.

‘And who are you, my dear?’ she says, pleasantly. ‘Who are you? I don’t think we’ve met …’

I know it’s because her mind is going: but I’m still unnerved.

‘Evelyn. I’m Vivienne—remember?’ But she doesn’t.

‘Vivienne,’ she says thoughtfully. ‘Such a pretty name.’

I think how she’s nicer to me when she doesn’t know who I am. The thought depresses me.

I go to put my hand on her sleeve, with some inchoate thought that my touch might remind her that I’m her daughter-in-law and bring her back to reality. She stares at my hand on her arm, surprised, a little disapproving—as though I have been too intimate. I snatch my hand away.

‘You must let me get you some tea, dear, after you’ve come so far,’ she says. ‘You’re so good to come and see me. I think there’s some
gâche
in the larder …’

‘Evelyn. This is where I live. I’m Eugene’s wife,’ I say.

She stares at me, shocked; she raises her thin, arched eyebrows.

‘No, I don’t think you are, dear.’ Her voice is cold and clear; and stronger, as though her certainty gives her energy. ‘You’re wrong there. You see, Eugene never married. He has the highest standards.’

There’s nothing I can say to that. I leave her sitting there. Five minutes later she calls for me.

‘Vivienne. I’ve dropped my glasses, and I can’t seem to see where they’ve gone. Could you be a dear and find them for me?’

As though the strange little incident never happened.

Because she’s so frail now, Evelyn stops going to church. She’s too weak to walk there any more, and the service tires her too much. I arrange for the Rector to come and give her Communion at Le Colombier. I decide I will stay home with her. But Blanche still goes to Matins, and sometimes takes Millie too.

‘Mum—why don’t you ever come to church any more?’ she asks me.

‘I don’t really like to leave your grandma,’ I say. Her eyes are on me, blue as summer. ‘But it’s not just that, is it?’ she says.

I hesitate. Perhaps she’s right—perhaps Evelyn is just an excuse.

‘To be honest, I’m not sure how much I believe now, really,’ I tell her. ‘With the war and all the suffering.’

‘But you could still come, Mum. You don’t have to believe all of it.’

‘I don’t know …’

I wonder if my reluctance is partly because of Gunther; when he is so precious to me, yet everyone at church would think this love of mine was wrong—and wrong in so many many ways. I remember Johnnie’s visit, hear his words in my head.
There are women on Guernsey who are doing what they shouldn’t. Letting the side down. You know what I mean …
I can hear his tone when he said these things—all the contempt in his voice.

‘Anyway—the war and suffering must be for a purpose,’ says Blanche. ‘That’s what the Rector said. It must all be part of God’s plan. There must be a purpose to it.’ As though this is simple and clear to her.

‘I’m not sure, sweetheart …’

I’m happy she has this certainty—envy it, even, that she can find some kind of order in all that’s happening in the world, all this terrible anarchy. But I don’t share it.

I polish my pictures and photographs. I wipe them with a damp cloth, then buff the glass with screwed-up newspaper, that always gives a good shine. I clean the Margaret Tarrant print in my kitchen, the Christ Child surrounded by angels with vast, soft, fretted wings. In the living room, I pick up the photo of Eugene. I haven’t cleaned it for a while—the glass has a blue pallor of dust. I stare at the picture, move my finger across it, as though the feel of the glass against my skin will somehow make him real to me. His image in my mind is losing its definition: sometimes I have to look at his picture to remember his face. I stare at the photograph, trying to learn him again. Pushing away the secret, the thing that I try not to think: that he’s become so remote to me—someone to whom I have little connection at all. That to think of being in bed with Eugene is like a betrayal of Gunther. That Gunther is my real husband, the one I am meant to be with—and my marriage a distant, unreal thing: an old formality, without substance.

‘That’s my boy,’ says Evelyn, watching. ‘My darling boy.’

‘It’s a lovely picture,’ I say.

I clean it fastidiously, wipe every single speck of dust from the frame. As though that could make him clearer to me.

There’s a story in Angie’s folktale book that tells how a traveller once arrived in Guernsey and beached his flimsy boat between L’Erée Bay and Perelle.

‘We’ve been there, Mummy. I know where Perelle Beach is,’ says Millie. Her eyes shine. It always thrills her when her story is set in a place that she knows.

Blanche glances up from the
Vogue
she’s reading.

‘I don’t like that beach. It’s creepy,’ she says. ‘At low tide it’s nothing but stones.’

Blanche is right—it’s a desolate spot, all grey pebbles and the churning sound of the sea, a fitting setting for some untoward thing to happen.

The story tells how the stranger was accosted by a fisherman, who boldly asked who he was and why he had come. But the stranger wouldn’t tell his name or the name of the country he came from—just said,
‘J’vais cheminant.’ I go wandering.
The wanderer settled on Guernsey and married an island woman; he never revealed his origins, but remained a mystery to the day of his death.

‘So she never found out who he was?’ says Blanche. ‘That must have been awfully strange.’

The story stays in my mind. I wonder what it was like for that woman—to marry someone of whom she knew nothing at all. Yet how much do we ever know about those we love or even marry—their history, where they come from, what has made them who they are? How well did I really know Eugene? Even knowing his mother, his island, the walls of his childhood home, I can think of him and it’s as if he’s a stranger to me. How well do I know Gunther, who is so often in my bed? I think how this question once troubled me—how I asked him about it, pressed him:
What are you like when you’re not with me?
Yet it troubles me so much less now. Perhaps I’ve learned that a lover will always
come to you out of the mists of the sea, beaching his boat on your shores for a while, yet still in some sense mysterious. To love is to give yourself to the unknown. What other choice do we have?

T
he days lengthen. There’s a fresh spring wind that rummages through my orchard, ripping at the blossoms, so beneath the trees the ground is drifted with a sleet of white. I tend my vegetable patch. I earth up my potatoes; I put up hazel peasticks for my peas and runner beans, and cover them over with nets to protect them from the pigeons. I hoe round the vegetables regularly—weeds grow so fast in spring. I pick lettuces and radishes, and plant out the sprouts and cabbages that I have been growing from seed. I start keeping chickens. I buy the pullets from Harry Tostevin—Rhode Island Reds, with chestnut plumage and furtive orange eyes. Johnnie helps me build a run at the bottom of the garden, where our land turns a corner round the back of Les Vinaires. To my surprise, I find that I really enjoy the chickens: I like the ripple of sound they make as they bustle and chatter and fuss, love collecting the eggs that are softly brown and nestle warm in your palm. Millie helps me with the eggs and gives the chickens extravagant names taken from her storybooks— Rapunzel, Cinderella. Angie gives me a lesson in how to prepare one for the table, how to pluck it and
gut it. Bread is rationed now—but I know I can feed my family, and this gives me a full, warm, satisfied feeling.

In May, we hear that there has been a terrible air-raid on London: they say that over three thousand people are dead. I’m so afraid for Iris and her family. I think of the horror of the bombing of St Peter Port—think of that happening every night, all around you. Of the people caught in the firestorms; or sheltering in the Underground, hearing the devastation above them, wondering with every bomb that falls— Is that my house? Going out with the All Clear to see their world destroyed. Blanche’s eyes fill with tears when she hears the news. ‘Those poor, poor people,’ she says.

I walk up the hill to see Angie. It’s a breezy May morning, wet washing snapping on clothes-lines in all the gardens I pass, and notice a powdery, nostalgic scent on the air, where the tight cones of buds on the lilacs are loosening and letting out their perfume.

Angie isn’t quite meeting my gaze. She pulls at a thread on her sleeve.

‘There’s something I want to tell you,’ she says. ‘So you’ll hear it first from me.’

I wonder what is coming.

‘It’s Jack—my brother,’ she says. ‘No one’s told you anything, then?’

‘No, Angie. Why would they?’ She clears her throat.

‘The thing is—he’s doing some work for
them.
You know what I mean.’ Her voice is ragged and secretive. ‘He’s working up at the airfield.’

‘Well, we all have to get by somehow,’ I say. ‘He’s not proud of it, to be honest. But he has to feed his little ones.’

I hear all the pleading in her voice—how desperately she wants me to be forgiving, not to mind.

‘Of course he does,’ I tell her. ‘Of course that’s what matters the most.’

‘He’s got those four growing children, and hardly any land. Don’t think badly of him, Vivienne.’

‘Of course I wouldn’t think badly of him,’ I say. ‘We all have to find a way to get through. All of us.’

But she doesn’t seem to hear me. Perhaps she misreads my expression, seeing some uneasiness in my face: though I’m thinking of myself, not Jack. But the thing I could tell her to comfort her is the one thing I can’t say.

‘I know there are some who’d condemn him. There are nasty words for people who do what Jack is doing,’ she says. ‘And to be honest you can understand it. When you hear the news from London—it’s the worst thing in the world to feel that someone you love has
helped.’

I don’t say anything for a moment. I’m not quite looking at her.
Someone I love has certainly helped.

‘I wouldn’t condemn him, Angie. Really.’

But something about me troubles her: she isn’t reassured.

Sometimes I see the other Germans in the garden of Les Vinaires, when I’m working in my chicken run, where the hedge is low and we can see into each other’s gardens. Hans Schmidt, the pink-faced, fair one, seems to be the gardener—though all he does is to cut the grass and prune an occasional branch. When
he is out there working, Alphonse will sidle up to him, and Hans will make a great fuss of him—kneeling down to him, rubbing between his ears—so the cat will purr and arch ecstatically.

On warm days, Max Richter will sometimes sit out on the lawn with a book. It makes me uncomfortable—in spite of all his kindness when Millie was hurt. He is a watcher. I know he misses nothing.

If he sees Millie in the garden, he will wave to her over the hedge. One day when she is skipping and I am feeding the hens, he calls to her.

‘Millie, let me show you something.’

She goes to him. He reaches his hands across the gate towards her. His hands are loosely clasped together, and I see there is a butterfly fluttering between his folded fingers.

‘This is a beautiful creature,’ he says.

‘It’s called a butterfly,’ she tells him, slightly superior.

‘And does this butterfly have a special name?’ he asks her.

He parts his hands a little—just enough to let Millie see. Millie peers between his fingers. The sunlight glints on his boots, and on the gun that shows at his belt.

‘That’s a Painted Lady,’ Millie tells him. ‘They come all the way from Africa. My mother told me.’

‘It’s a pretty name,’ he says.

‘Once I saw a Jersey Tiger,’ she says. ‘They have tiger stripes on their wings.’

‘You have beautiful butterflies on your island,’ he says. She frowns slightly, watching his hands. ‘You must be careful not to hurt it,’ she says. ‘Yes, I will be careful.’

‘Do you have butterflies where you come from?’ she says.

He smiles.

‘Yes, we have butterflies,’ he says.

They look at it for a moment longer, their dark heads bent together, his hair close-cropped, hers loose and messy and falling over her face, the sun shining on them. I watch them, and think of all the people dead in London, all the wrenching grief, all the innocent lives ripped apart, and I can’t put it all together, can’t make any sense of it.

‘I think you should let the butterfly go now,’ says Millie. Rather reproving—like an adult speaking to a child. ‘They don’t like to be trapped like that. Wild creatures don’t like to be trapped.’

‘Yes, you’re right, of course,’ he says. ‘But I’ve been careful not to hurt it.’

He opens his hands. The butterfly flits lazily away. Millie goes back to her skipping.

Later I hear the girls talking.

‘I saw you,’ says Blanche. ‘I saw you talking to that German next door.’

‘He had a butterfly. He showed me,’ says Millie. ‘Grandma will tell you off if she sees you speaking to Germans,’ says Blanche. Millie shrugs.

‘Grandma didn’t see us,’ she says, limpidly. ‘And anyway, that’s not a German, that’s Max.’