When the Sky Fell Apart (18 page)

Someone must have told Maman about Gregor, because one day, when Claudine came home, Maman's eyes were hard.

‘I don't want you going on the beach by yourself anymore,' she said.

Claudine's stomach jumped. She told Maman about Gregor being different.

Maman said, ‘But he's still German. He's still the enemy. You're too young to understand.'

Nothing would change her mind or the sad, disappointed downwards tug at the corners of her mouth. In the end, Claudine cried and put her head in Maman's lap, which smelt of the warm fug of potato peelings and ersatz tobacco.

Claudine waited until she hoped Maman had forgotten about Gregor and then she went back to playing with him, just as before, except she hurried home sooner, her chest like a squeezed balloon. She was also more careful about not being seen. The war had made tattletales of everybody.

At night, they listened to more news. The London Underground had been bombed and there was a 120-foot crater in the ground. Claudine tried to picture it but all she could see was the gaping mouth of a grey-and-black monster, crunching down on buildings, trains, people. She had nightmares and woke lathered in sweat.

Sometimes, when a nightmare roused her early, she crept out alone in the velvet hour of the morning, when everything was clean and blank and the patrols were mostly asleep or too bleary-eyed to notice a lone girl. She'd slip through the long grass towards the beach, where she sat on the sand, running the cold shingle through her fingers and staring at the sea. Black and grey too in the dawn gloom, like the flattened innards of the bombed city must be. When the tide went out, it left the mud and rocks covered in seaweed. No soldiers. No Jèrriais. Nothing but the roots of the sea.

OUT fishing, Maurice's main fear was the patrols. If they caught him sneaking out on his boat, it would be the finish for him.

He found ways to quell the fear and quash the risk: it wasn't so hard, learning the times of patrol switchover and memorising which soldiers were liable to fall asleep and which ones came on the job half cut or with a hangover.

Wednesdays were simple enough because the night patrol always knocked off early and went to sit on St Ouen's beach, smoking cigarettes they'd stolen or bought on the black market. Sundays were the worst: the changeover of duty was right near where Maurice liked to keep the boat moored because of the gentle tides and the straight route out to sea, with no worry about the biting reefs.

But he couldn't risk leaving the boat there with so many of the Germans about, so every Saturday night he'd moor the boat half a mile north of the usual spot, hoping the jaws of the rocks wouldn't catch the bottom of the boat. It meant a hell of a time climbing in and out of the boat: if the tide was up then he had to swim the last stretch, holding the sack (heavy with his catch) between his teeth, the sensation of creaking hessian making his nerves jangle.

He was still anxious about Marthe, of course, but his fear faded: how happy she was with Edith and what good care she took of his wife. By the time new year had been and gone, Marthe even seemed to have a bit more flesh on her tiny bones, despite the rationing. Her cheeks had plumped. Sometimes, Maurice could look at her from the corner of his eye and see the girl he'd married.

But then Marthe would twitch or moan, and Maurice would lose her all over again; he would feel a strange sort of
aching
in his chest. Not anger or sadness—more akin to that moment of being startled from a beautiful dream.

It was a relief to escape from it all and meet with the French fishermen. They were a rough sort, down to the last man, with scars from God knows what—Maurice never wanted to ask. They were different to how they'd been a few years back, though. War changed everything and the French smiled at him more now. They liked him because he was doing the same as them: sneaking around on his boat every night to bring back fish so his friends and family didn't starve to death.

In war, your enemy's enemy becomes your friend.

By early 1941, they had settled into a pattern. Once a month, when the moon was down, they all sailed out to the little islands just south of Jersey called Les Minquiers. Big rocks with a few broken-down houses—no one lived there year-round, but people used to camp out there for the odd night, before the war. Of course, they were a dangerous place to stay too long—the Germans had wind of them as a hiding place for escapees and checked them often.

But, provided it seemed safe, Maurice and the Frenchmen arrived near midnight. Sometimes they'd simply crouch in the boats and talk. Other times, if there were no patrols and there was enough cloud cover, they would scramble on to those rocks and sit awhile, drinking and smoking and talking.

They only talked about the Germans on days when the French had brought along a bottle of brandy—black-market stuff that burned when Maurice swallowed. Sometimes, one of the handier Frenchmen might make a little fire with some dried twigs and a flint. He would always make sure it was low down in a sunken hole in the rocks, so the flames couldn't be seen.

Maurice was rarely close enough to feel the warmth in his bones, but the colour was a fine thing. Glimmer of orange hope in the darkness. Simply watching the faces of the Frenchmen in the glow took the chill from his own skin. It carried him back to nights in front of the fire when he was a boy. He could smell the sea water and fish stink coming from his papa's clothes as they dried. A dreadful, bitter stench, really, and it stuck in his nostrils for days afterwards, but now it seemed the smell of warmth and safety and faraway peace.

The French were full of tales about the Germans. Maurice never knew what to believe; hard to know how far a man can be trusted to tell the truth, especially a fisherman.

But the Frenchmen hooted and rolled about laughing with much of what they said. They had a story about a drunken German soldier in France who had thought he was back in Leipzig with his own woman. He had climbed into bed with a Frenchman's wife while she was asleep. When the Frenchman came home from his meeting with the Resistance, he found his wife curled up next to a drunken German soldier. He shot them both.

The fishermen loved the story and they told it again and again until Maurice could have recited it word for word. He chuckled along with them. But something in the story plagued him. Before the war, Maurice couldn't have imagined an anger so consuming that it could turn an ordinary man into a murderer, but now he conjured the feeling with little effort.

The fishermen sniggered about the Commandant in Jersey, said they knew all about him—his face and stomach so bloated that they called him
pleine lune
. They said that he never stood for long at the top of a hill because he couldn't stop himself from rolling down to the bottom. That they could have used him as a buoy for mooring their boat but it would make the boat impossible to hide.

The jokes went on and on. Maurice laughed along with them: mocking the monster stole a little of his power, for a moment at least. The Frenchmen said the Commandant had syphilis and he'd caught it from his horse. Maurice laughed loudest at this but they all stopped to stare at him in surprise and said, ‘
Non, non! C'est vrai, c'est vrai!'
And then they all guffawed again and he didn't know if it was because the Commandant had caught syphilis from his horse, or because Maurice had believed them.

They also told other tales. Stories about women raped and murdered. Pregnant women—their stomachs split open and their babes burned before their eyes. Shops and businesses looted by the invading army, or torched—the shopkeepers screaming as they cooked. But when Maurice, heavy-hearted, asked them if any of these things had happened to them or to their wives, or their friends, they looked away and didn't reply.

When Maurice really pressed them, everything they said, all those terrible things, had happened to a friend of a friend in La Rochelle, or a neighbour's second cousin in Montmartre. Or it was only a story they had heard, probably not true.

Because the Germans couldn't truly be that evil, could they?

It was impossible in this new, shifting world called
Occupation—
a sort of stasis of enforced peace amid a war—to know whom to trust. But the stories made Maurice fret for Marthe all the same. The Germans hadn't hurt anyone in Jersey. Not really. Not irreparably. But it only took one soldier who thought too much of himself, or one Jerseyman to say something foolish. Or someone with a chip on their shoulder—and goodness knows there were enough of those about.

Often, Maurice left those meetings on the rocks feeling worse than he had before, and not only because of the terrible hangovers. His peace was gone. Those moments of emptiness when he dragged the nets in and all he thought about was putting one hand in front of the other and hauling till his back and shoulders burned and then counting the catch and throwing back any tiddlers with a blessing for the sea… Gone, all gone. All he could think of was Marthe and what would happen if a soldier found her alone.

The fish fetched a good price on the black market, which Clement Hacquoil was running now he was out of hospital. Maurice could take his catch into his shop and they might trade: fish for meat. Or he could exchange for shoes or ersatz coffee. Clement hadn't been too happy to trade with Maurice, until he dropped Edith's name. Once Maurice said it was for Edith, the butcher would give him anything he wanted, as long as his wife wasn't listening in.

Maurice tried not to gape at Hacquoil's face. Eight months after the bombings and he still looked like a squid that had been left too long in the sun.
Candle Nose
the children called him. Some of the adults too, though you'd think they would know better. His movements were still odd—jerky and awkward. From the pain, Edith said. She thought it might ease with time. Then again, it might not.

They'd found the war tricky, the Hacquoils. Before, they'd had half the island at their beck and call. Partly because of the butcher's shop and the good meat that people wanted for their children's bellies. But, in the main, it was Joan. She collected people's secrets, hoarded them like those underground truffles rich folk would pay a fortune for. Then she dug them up, waved them around in the light:
Look at what I've discovered. How much is it worth?
Sometimes she used her knowledge to lord it over people, or turn them against each other at just the right time. Sometimes, they provided leverage to gain extra support—a few more votes for a friend who wanted to be a Senator or a Deputy. Sometimes she sat with that knowledge for years, enjoying having folk creeping around after her. A spider, just waiting.

But since the Germans had arrived, she'd been running the shop by herself and she'd lost some of her sway. Rumour had it, no sooner was Clement out of hospital than she was pushing him into black-market trading. She still collected secrets, where she could, from Jèrriais and Germans alike, by all accounts.

For his own part, Maurice stayed well away from her; he tried to earn favours from people, rather than grabbing and squeezing for them. He gave fish to this person and that: the grocer, a few policemen, the harbour-master. Sometimes he exchanged for just a scrap of meat or a few potatoes. Not a fair trade, but oftentimes he'd found it could be useful to have someone thinking they might owe you something one day. In the meantime, food bought people's silence.

Besides, it gave him some satisfaction to give some extra food to Edith and Marthe and Claudine. Just watching them eat gave him a glow.

Sometimes the girl wouldn't take the fish, though. She smiled and said, ‘I'm full up, thank you.'

It had to be rubbish, of course—no one had been full for the longest time.

One day, Maurice said to her, ‘Come, don't be a fool, child. There's no shame in taking the fish. Your maman will thank you for it.'

She smiled. ‘We have plenty of food.'

‘Well, then, I'll have to throw them away.'

She rolled her eyes. ‘I sup
pose
I can take them then.'

He had just cooked up a bream to share with Marthe, fried it with some wild garlic and the little scraping of butter from his ration.

‘Well, if you're full up, you won't be wanting any bream?'

‘No, thank you.'

‘It's a big fish and there's plenty to go around.'

‘But I'm
really
, truly not hungry today.'

He was flaking the white fish flesh from the bones ready for Marthe, but he set down the knife and fork and frowned. ‘You're pulling my leg.'

‘No, I'm not hungry.'

‘But…
how?
' The rations were mostly vegetables and that wasn't enough to feed a growing child.

She smiled again and looked down at her shoes. ‘I've a friend.'

‘If it's Clement Hacquoil then you tell him that any extra meat is to come Edith's way too.'

‘Not Monsieur Hacquoil. A better friend than that.' She was twisting her hair around her finger and smiling.